...
IBM's returns fell short of its expectations, in part due to the growth
in local processing architectures, which had invalidated IBM's strategy
to link ATMs to its expensive mainframes.
... snip ...

There are articles about OS/2 lingering on in ATM market long after it
had disappeared elsewhere

For those who like to regress to their youth? :-)

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
I suspect that another cause of abrupt lane changes is people who
depend so totally on their GPS that they're not aware that their
exit is coming up. Suddenly they get the warning from their GPS
and they're in the left lane - so they abruptly cut across two or
three lanes to get to the exit. Better hope they miss you.

no they do it on purpose .... get as far as possible in the outside lane
and cut across at the last moment. simplest version is to stay in
through lane and then cut in at the very last moment of the off-ramp
lane. past discussion in a.f.c. on the characterristic is that it only
takes less than one percent of people doing this to change (heavy)
traffic from near speed limit to stop&go. in past, there has been news
about road rage and shootings because of such behavior. some localities
have gone to enormous trouble to engineer highway off-ramps to inhibit
such behavior because it has such disastrous effects on highway
efficiency and throughput (like "through" lanes with physical barrier
separating "local access" lanes with off-ramps)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#66 When/why did "programming" become "software development?"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#4 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?

from above:
The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was
developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from
nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic
- typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

... snip ...

and frequently what forces that driver to slow down/brake is an
aggresive driving lane change right in front.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

note this one percent aggressive drivers can be sociopaths whos objective
in life are to play win/loose (beat the other guy, weaving in&out of
traffic and other areas of life) ... find it almost impossible to play
win/win (like being responsible for dramatic switch from free-flowing to
"shock-wave" accordian stop&go).

references Snowden affair and outsourcing to (especially
private-equity) "for profit" companies:
So despite the promise of the cyber warfare and cloud capabilities
Booz Allen is now marketing not just to Uncle Sam but also to Mideast
governments and US banks and energy producers, resist the urge to buy
the "Snowden dip." Booz Allen is an "Spiinvestment that works best for
senior insiders and their paymasters at Carlyle. Everyone else is
dispensable. Security risk is just one of the risks of this security."

also
Just this week, the NSA director testified that the agency would be
implementing a "buddy system" requiring two authorizations for the
download of classified information onto portable media.

... snip ...

note that "buddy system" was standard security requirement by at least
the 80s. In the 90s, I designed a (payment) security chip and did an
audit of a gov. certified chip foundry for security chips (that would
build the chips) ... and it required "pairs of eyeballs" (nearly all
actions required pairs of people as countermeasure to insider
threats).

IBM has gone into the red and is in the process of being broken up
into the 13 "baby blues". The board then hires away the former
president of AMEX to reverse the breakup and resurrect IBM. Uses some
of same techniques at IBM that had been used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

Later the former president of AMEX leaves IBM and becomes head of
another large private-equity company which does LBO (among others) of
company that will employ Snowden.

pg77/loc1257-59:
When Rubin left to cash in on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Clinton
nominated Lawrence Summers to fill the post and reappointed Ayn Rand
fanboy Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

pg77/loc1259-60:
When Brooksley Born, Clinton's chairman of the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission, proposed to regulate the derivatives market, she
was crushed by the troika of Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers.

Responsible for GLBA and repeal of Glass-Steagall, Brooksley Born was
quickly replaced by Gramm's wife blocking CDS regulation while Gramm
got provision added that prevented CDS regulation (described as favor
for Enron). She then resigns and joins ENRON board and the audit
committee.

and another presides over the financial mess, 70 times larger than S&L
crisis.

pg57/loc931-33:
It only remained for his Republican successor, George W. Bush, to push
through further tax cuts and anesthetize the Securities and Exchange
Commission by appointing as chairman a useful idiot, former Republican
congressman Chris Cox, for the completion of the deregulation process.

Rhetoric in Congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future
ENRONs and guarantee that executives and auditors did jail time, but
it required that SEC do something. Possibly because even GAO didn't
believe SEC was doing anything, it started doing reports of fraudulent
public company financial filines, even showing increase after SOX goes
into effect (and nobody doing jailtime).

Technology and the F-16 Fighting Falcon Jet Fighter
https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/CentennialofAviation/TechnologyandtheF-16FightingFalconJetFighter.aspx
Because of the fly-by-wire, all-electronic, computer-based flight
control system, some have called the F-16 the "electric jet" or "an
airplane wrapped around a computer." I don't feel comfortable with that;
I want the "smarts" to remain in the cockpit, to be vested in the
pilot. The pilot uses his natural, inherent intellect to govern the
airplane; he (or she) makes the airplane "obedient." It responds with
minimum commands to the pilot's needs.

In conjunction with the fly-by-wire flight control system, we changed
the dynamics of the airplane, which dramatically enhanced its
capabilities. We adopted what we called relaxed static stability, which
meant that, with the center of lift forward of the center of gravity
instead of aft of it, the airplane would be statically unstable. No
matter, though. With artificial stability, the airplane would be much
more dynamic - as much as two and one-half times as dynamic as the F-4C
Phantom. Relaxed static stability allowed the airplane to achieve an
initial pitch rate of 5 g's per second with "deadbeat" damping-no
overshoot. Maneuvers could be instantaneously initiated and precisely
controlled - a very important factor.

... snip ...

Tribute To John R. Boyd
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/f16_article.html?item_id=156
Over the next six years, I participated in many all-night sessions in
Washington DC with Boyd and his small elite group. The group came to be
known as the "Fighter Mafia" because of its close-knit underground
operation. The mafia dissected and analyzed every facet of air combat
and its relevance to aircraft parameters. In the process, we defined a
concept for what became known as the Lightweight Fighter, progenitor to
the F-16.

What Will the Next A-10 Warthog Look Like?

What Will the Next A-10 Warthog Look Like?
http://warisboring.com/articles/what-will-the-next-a-10-warthog-look-like/

Air Force has been about strategic bombing ... '43 Strategic Bombing
Program had all money going to bombers. British observation was that
Battle of Britain demonstrated the need for long-range fighters for
bombing programs ... but the US insisted on relearning the lesson the
hard way. F35 designed as "bomb truck" ... assuming F22 flying cover,
handling air superiority role.

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to
obfuscate fraudulent mortgages. In the late 90s, I was asked to try
and help prevent the coming economic mess by looking at improving the
integrity of supporting documents as countermeasures. Then
lenders were securitizing loans&mortgages and paying for triple-A
ratings. Triple-A rating trumps supporting documentation and they can
start doing no-documentation liar loans. Being able to pay for
triple-A eliminated any reason for loan originators to care about loan
quality, they could sell off (all loans as fast as they could be made)
to customers restricted to dealing in "safe" investments, largely
enabling over $27T done 2001-2008. In the Oct2008 congressional
hearings into the role that the rating agencies played, there was
testimony that both the rating agencies and the sellers paying for the
triple-A ratings, knew that they weren't worth triple-A.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

Rhetoric in Congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future
ENRONs and guarantee that executives and auditors did jail time, but
it required that SEC do something. Possibly because even GAO didn't
believe SEC was doing anything, it started doing reports of fraudulent
public company financial filines, even showing increase after SOX goes
into effect (and nobody doing jailtime).

In the Madoff congressional hearings, they had the person that had
tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get SEC to do something about
Madoff. SEC's hands were forced when Madoff turned himself in (later
speculation was that Madoff had defrauded some unsavory characters and
turned himself in looking for gov. protection).

Not as well known, Sarbanes-Oxley also required SEC to do something
about the rating agencies (selling triple-A rating was the major
factor in doing over $27T 2001-2008) ... and SEC didn't do anything
about that either.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

Recent "Deep State" explanation for SEC not doing anything,
pg57/loc931-33:
It only remained for his Republican successor, George W. Bush, to push
through further tax cuts and anesthetize the Securities and Exchange
Commission by appointing as chairman a useful idiot, former Republican
congressman Chris Cox, for the completion of the deregulation process

Thanks Obama

Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btinternet.com> writes:
In the "socialist" countries the politicians promised many things but
delivered few. The US Government is delivering lots of things but is
having trouble paying for them.

That doesn't include things like the $60B+ in pallets of shrink wrapped
$100 bills air lifted to Iraq that disappears.

More recent the long term costs of the two wars is between $5T and $6T
(and it is the only time that taxes were reduced to not pay for the wars
rather than increasing taxes to pay for wars).

In the 90s, congress passed a bill requiring all agencies pass financial
audits ... it is two decades since all other agencies pass audits
... but not DOD. There was some speculation that DOD might have passed a
financial audit in 2017, but there is increasing doubts that will
happen.

The first major bill after the fiscal responsibility act was allowed to
expire, was medicare part-d. CBS 60mins did an expose of the 18
repulicans & staff responsible for shepherding the bill. At the last
minute they insert a one line sentence that prevents competitive bidding
and prevent CBO from distributing a report analysing the effects of the
change. CBS 60mins show identical drugs under part-D and competitive
bidding that are 1/3rd the cost (of those under part-D). After it
passes, all 18 have resigned and are on drug industry payroll.

middle of last decade, US Comptroller General starts including in
speeches that nobody in congress can do middle school arithmetic (for
how badly they were savaging the budget) and that part-d comes to be a
long term $40T totally swamping all other budget items (enormous
congressional gift to the drug industry).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#comptroller.general

Besides the trillions increase in "legal" tax evasion created last
decade ... there has also been a big increase in the illegal tax
evasion. Spring of 2009, IRS says that it is going after $400B in
taxes on illegal income stashed offshore by 52,000 wealthy
individuals. In 2011, the new congress says that it was cutting the
budget on the IRS department responsible for recovering those
funds. Since then there have news reports of a few billion in fines on
the too big to fail institutions reponsible for enabling that
illegal tax evasion, but nothing about the recovery of the $400B.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

One of the growing federal budget items is the interest paid on the
federal debt. Middle of last decade, there was article explaining why
Federal Reserve also backed getting rid of the fiscal responsibility
act. As a gift to too big to fail, Federal Reserve would provide tens
of trillions in ZIRP funds, the too big to fail could then turn around
and buy treasuries (federal debt) getting an "easy" $300B/year.

There is an estimate that the too big to fail have been fined an
aggregate of $300B since 2008 for their illegal activity .... but
besides the enormous profits on illegal activity, it is more than offset
by the $300B/annum they can make with ZIRP funds off federal debt.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Ancient History (OS's) - was : IBM Destination z - What the Heck Is JCL and Why Does It Look So Funny?

other trivia ... after 64, commodore did amiga ... which ran ARexx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx
ARexx is an implementation of the REXX language for the Amiga, written
in 1987 by William S. Hawes, with a number of Amiga-specific features
beyond standard REXX facilities. Like most REXX implementations, ARexx
is an interpreted language. Programs written for ARexx are called
"scripts", or "macros"; several programs offer the ability to run ARexx
scripts in their main interface as macros.

... snip ...

more trivia ... acorn group in Boca kept claiming that they wouldn't
going to do any software and an IBM group was formed in silicon valley
to write software for acorn. Then at some point the Boca group changed
their mind and wanted responsibility for all software ... if necessary
contracting with outside groups (some viewed as eliminating internal
competition).

linda.lstsrv@COMCAST.NET (Linda) writes:
I had an Apple ][ with an acoustic coupler. It auto dialed over a
regular telco dial tone line using a program loaded from a cassette
player, or if one could afford it, from an early floppy drive. The
college I went to had a Univac 90/70d. The were 4 student dialup
numbers. I could get into one of those much like the scene from War
Games. It was fun.

TYMSHARE made their CMS-based online computer conferencing available free
to SHARE as VMSHARE starting in Aug1976 ... archives:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare

In the 70s, I started trying to get IBM to let me put all the VMSHARE
files up on internal systems ... including the world-wide
sales&marketing support HONE system. One of the biggest battles I had
with IBM was the lawyers were afraid that customer information would
contaminate IBM employees.

My brother was Apple regional marketing rep at the time (largest
physical region in CONUS) and I started trying to get him to setup up an
apple that would do terminal emulation for copying all the files down
from TYMSHARE ... he never quite got around to doing it ... although
over the years ... when he would come into town for business meetings I
would get invited to dinners ... and even got to argue with the MAC
developers about design (before MAC was announced).

DEC and The Americans

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
How odd. A lot of people have replaced their credit cards for debit cards
in the US.

led to crisis for card associations ... interchange fee for credit card
transactions is enormously larger than service fee for debit cards
transations. card associations tried to counter it with the introduction
of "signature debit" and forced it as default at point-of-sale ...
worked just like credit, ran through the credit card network and had the
same intercvhange fee as credit (but was debit account backend instead
credit account ... which has some other problems).

Retail Merchant Assocation sued the card associations for it and
eventually won .... getting several billion in damages (aka retail
merchants were being forced to paying enormously larger fees when debit
transaction ran througgh as signature debit through the credit card
networks ... than they had to pay when it ran as pin debit through the
debit networks). However, nearly all debit cards now have little
(credit) card association logo on them ... enabling them for signature
debit, running over the credit network and subject to credit transaction
fees.

The other issue with credit transaction fees was that they were heavily
prorated based on associated fraud rates. Introduction of strong
anti-fraud technologies was resisted because it would eliminate the
fraud surchange which was up to 90% of fees (cutting it to close to pin
debit). A difference between EU and US is that in EU, these fees account
for less than 10% of bank bottom line ... but for many major banks in
the US, it accounts for 40-60% of their bottom line (the fraud surcharge
has an enormous profit component).

To anticipate eventually having to deploy strong anti-fraud
technologies, they have spent much of the last decade on "cash back"
programs .... for electronic transactions ... the bank profit margin on
the "cash back" fees charged merchants designed to replace the enormous
profit on fraud surchanges ... that can be drastically reduced with
deployment of strong anti-fraud technologies (periodically in the 90s
and last decade, there have been discussions on how banks love card
fraud because they've used it to justify such huge profits).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Mandelbrot left IBM in 1987, after 35 years and 12 days, when IBM
decided to end pure research in his division.[20] He joined the
Department of Mathematics at Yale, and obtained his first tenured post
in 1999, at the age of 75.[21] At the time of his retirement in 2005, he
was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IBM Destination z - What the Heck Is JCL and Why Does It Look So Funny?

tom@TOMBRENNANSOFTWARE.COM (Tom Brennan) writes:
Yep - I'm hoping they'll like the batch facilities in MVS which in my
opinion are far beyond unix. This might be a spot where a history
lesson is needed, but I wasn't around in the early days:

From what I've read, MVS started with nothing but batch jobs and later
grew into online systems. So TSO is just another batch job that
happens to communicate with a terminal. On the unix side though, it
seems they started with online terminals first, so a batch
(background) job was later created as a terminal session with no
terminal.

I've pointed that out before ... CTSS was conversational online default
from the start, then some of the people went to the 5th flr and did
Multics (and folklore is that some of the Bell Labs people went back
home and did a simplified Multics, calling it unix) ... and other of the
people went to the science center on the 4th flr and did CP/40-CMS
(making hardware modifications to 360/40 to support virtual memory),
which morphs into CP/67-CMS when standard 360/67 with virtual memory
standard comes available .... precursor to VM/370-CMS (cms originally
stood for "cambridge monitor system" ... is renamed "converstational
monitor system" for vm/370). some cambridge science center posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

I've periodically mentioned Kildall working with CP/67-CMS at NPG
school, before doing CP/M, which then morphs at Seattle Computing, and
leads to ms/dos.

os/360 assumed batch ... and had to provide increasing about of
contingency handling capability ... while conversational started out
assuming responsible human was there to handle the contigency cases.

we were working with director of NSF and were suppose to get $20M to tie
together the the NSF supercomputer centers. Then congress cuts the
budget, some other things happen, and then they release an RFP ... but
internal politics prevent us bidding on the RFP (director of NSF tries
to help by writing the corporation a letter, but that just makes
internal politics worse). As regional networks tie into the centers, it
morphs into NSFNET backbone, precursor to modern internet some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

We do get TCP/IP product for mainframe but there are quite a few issues
... getting 44kbytes/sec using near full 3090 processor. I do the
enhancements to support RFC1044 and in some tuning tests at Cray
Research get full sustained channel speed throughput between 4341 and a
Cray, using only a modest amount of 4341 (possibly 500 times improvement
in bytes moved per instruction executed). some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#rfc1044

Late 80s, a senior disk engineer gets a talk scheduled at annual,
world-wide, internal communication group conference, supposedly on 3174
performance ... but opens the talk with statement that the communication
group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk
division. The issue was that the communication group had strangle hold
on datacenters with corporate strategic ownership of everything crossing
the datacenter walls, and were fiercely fighting off distributed
computing and client/server (trying to preserve their dumb terminal
paradigm and install base). The disk division was starting to see data
fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms
with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with a number of
solutions to reverse the process, but were constantly being vetoed by
the communication group. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

In the late 60s, increasing number of cp/67-cms customers were extending
to 7x24 availability (including some number of commercial online service
bureaus). One of the issues in the 60s mainframes were rented and
initially, it was hard to promote offshit use enough to recover system
costs. There was a lot of work done to reduce system costs (especially
offshift). Part of system rental costs were based on the system meter
that ran whenever the processor or any channel was running. All
processor and channel activity had to be quiet for at least 400ms before
system meter would stop. Special terminal CCWs were created to allow
channel to stop ... but immediately start ondemand when characters were
coming in ... some of the stuff sort of analogous being done for
on-demand cloud computing (trivia long after mainframes had converted
from rental to sales, MVS still had timer task that woke up every 400ms
... making sure that system meter never stopped).

Other stuff to further minimize offshift costs was eliminating operator
requirements. Another early CP/67 enhancement in the 60s was automatic
re-ipl after failure (system come up and available w/o needing any human
intervention). In the early 70s, as environments became more complex,
increasing amount of CP/67 services were provided by service virtual
machines (analogous to demons ... the current cloud virtual machines
are referring then to virtual appliances) that are not connected to any
real terminal. In the early 70s, I do the autolog command for CP/67
... which is used for a wide variety of automation ... including
automatically bringing up service virtual machines at an automatic
IPL (w/o human intervention).

At the IBM Pisa Science Center they implemented SPM for CP/67 ... which
allowed software running in virtual machine to handle all interactions
that would normally involve real terminal. This was used in conjunction
with service virtual machines to implement automated operator. This
was moved to VM/370 ... but for some reason was never released to
customers. Over time, various VM/370 features were released to customers
like IUCV and SMSG ... but in aggregate they are still a subset of the
full SPM facility. A trivial example was that the author of REXX wrote a
multi-user spacewar game that relied on SPM ... and since the internal
network software supported SPM ... any number of players around the
network could play. There was a problem that some number of people
started writing player 'BOTs that would beat the human players. The game
was then enhanced so that energy use increased non-linearly as time
between moves decreased below some (human) threshold ... trying to level
the playing field between BOTs and humans. old email about moving lots
of stuff from CP/67 to VM/370 including SPM and autolog
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

By the early to mid-70s, vm/370 automated operator facilities and
service virtual machines were getting increasingly sophisticated.

We leave IBM in the early 90s and later are brought in as consultants to
a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on
the server (the two people responsible for the "commerce server", we had
previously worked with when they were at Oracle and we were at IBM), the
startup had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to
use, the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce". I had
absolute authority on the server to payment network side ... but could
only make recommendations on the browser side. A big part of my time was
developing compensating processes to do various kinds of contingency
automation (a lot of which were decades old from mainframe environment)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IBM Destination z - What the Heck Is JCL and Why Does It Look So Funny?

as undergraduate in the 60s, I did dynamic adaptive resource management
that was picked up and shipped in CP/67 (customers periodically referred
to as fairshare scheduler or wheeler scheduler because default policy
was fairshare).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

in the morph from CP/67 to VM/370 there was a lot of things dropped
and simplified ... including all the scheduling stuff.

with death of FS, there was mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product
pipelines .... which contributed to decision to release some amount of
the stuff I had been doing. Some of it was shipped in standard release.

Note that earlier in the 23Jun1969 unbundling announcement, ibm started
to charge for se services, maintenance, (application) software ... but
made the case that kernel software should still be free.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

During the FS period, the lack of 370 products is credited with given
clone processors a market foothold. So part of resuming 370 efforts, the
decision was made to also transition to start charging for all kernel
software (likely motivated by 370 clone makers getting market
foothold). The decision was made to make the scheduling work a guinee
pig as separate charged-for kernal product (I had to spend a lot of time
with lawyers and business people about kernel charging policies). After
the transition was complete to charging for all kernel software in the
80s ... the next step was the OCO-wars (aka only shipping object code).

As part of the product review process somebody in Armonk said he
wouldn't approve it unless it had customer setable parameters because
everybody knew that the state of the art was setable performance
parameters (MVS would have this huge array of setable parameters
... there would be lots of SHARE presentations about various tests of
random walks of all the setable parameters with various workloads). I
tried to explain to him what dynamic adaptive management met ... but
eventually had to implement some customer setable parameters. However,
there was a joke that I took from operations research and "degrees of
freedom". The range of values for the manually setable parameters was
less than what the dynamic adaptive calculations could do ... so
effectively the dynamic adaptive calculations could compensate for human
selected values.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Over a decade ago, somebody gave a talk in the middle east and
happened to mention that cybercrime was more than drug crime. This
resulted in 15mins. of fame and generated online arguments that
reverberated around the world. That night, I got an email request from
the speaker to find non-classified source for the information. I tried
the major law enforcement websites around the world, Pretty uniformly
the sites had readily available stats on drug crime ... but all
references to cybercrime required restricted authenticated access. I
eventually found a univ. professor academic paper referencing a
Lexis-Nexis article about cybercrime more than drug crime.

One issue is that some of the biggest cybercrime amounts have involved
financial institutions who are extremely publicity shy about such
events. at the financial critical infrastructure protection sessions,
the biggest concern was about information sharing ISACs not being
subject to FOIA ... crooks shared such details but they didn't want
the public finding out.

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
For the last several new military aircraft, software has been the
long pole in the tent. By leaps and bounds. The F-35 is flying and
still has years of software work before it's production quality and
fight-ready.

from ongoing cyber dumb theme .... F22 is 1.7M lines of code. For F35
things seem to be similar to F35 price quotes are just for airframe,
engine is extra. F35 originally was suppose to be 5.7M LOCs but as
increased to 8M LOCs ... but that appearently is just some subset
... claims are that full project is now 24M LOC ... and this is
infrastructure which is claimed to have already cyber-leaked all F35
details (alternative explanation to cyber dumb ... is that the F35 is
fake project that was leaked to adversaries on purpose).
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2013/05/28/us-weapons-compromised-chinese-cyberspies/

F35 original design as bomb truck with stealth primarily optimized
forward, assuming F22 flying cover and providing air superiority
... lots of the software my be vaporware given all the claims that they
are now trying to make for F35. more details than you may ever want to know
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-JSF-Analysis.html

one of the issues is that latest generation of high performance chips
are able to extract real-time location and targeting info from
multi-band radar (even with real stealth planes). A year ago, DOD put
export control on such chips ... at supercomputer conference last fall,
China showed that they were now producing their own (lots of the chips
are also used in supercomputers and china currently has the largest).

also analysis is that such chips can enable reducing the 2000
transmit/receive pairs in F22 AESA radar by nearly factor of 100 w/o
loss of capability (which would also reduce power requirement)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-77

Boyd also wrote the fighter pilot training manual that was used by the
US ... and then by many of the countries around the world. He told
story about CIA getting a copy of the Soviet manual ... who claimed it
was Boyd's translated to Russian and measures changed to metric.

FS was going to completely replace 370 and was completely different
During the FS period, they were killing off 370 efforts and the lack
of 370 products is credited with giving clone processors market
foothold. When FS imploded, there was mad rush to get products back
into 370 pipeline. 303x and 3081 were kicked off in parallel; 3033 was
remap of 168 logic to 20% faster chips from FS and 3081 used other
left-over technology from FS ... more detailed analysis
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm
The 370 emulator minus the FS microcode was eventually sold in 1980
as as the IBM 3081. The ratio of the amount of circuitry in the 3081
to its performance was significantly worse than other IBM systems of
the time; its price/performance ratio wasn't quite so bad because IBM
had to cut the price to be competitive. The major competition at the
time was from Amdahl Systems -- a company founded by Gene Amdahl, who
left IBM shortly before the FS project began, when his plans for the
Advanced Computer System (ACS) were killed. The Amdahl machine was
indeed superior to the 3081 in price/performance and spectaculary
superior in terms of performance compared to the amount of
circuitry.]

... snip ...

3033 was more like 1.5 times 168-3 ... the 20% faster chips had ten
times the circuits/chip ... and they redid some logic to optimize more
on chip operations. to get up to 1.5times.

Initial 3081D was 2processors was suppose to be same speed as
2processor 3033 ... but was more like 20% slower for many benchmarks.
They doubled cache for 3081K got it up to about same as 2processor
3033. 3084 was two 3081s (4 processors total) but it took a big hit
with 4-way performance.

there was issue that executives thought it might advance the state of
the art too fast and they would loose control of the market. Bottom of
the article it goes into ACS features that show up in ES/9000 more
than 20yrs later.

3090 was much more followon hardware to 165/168 (modulo the side-step
to do the quick&dirty 3033) ... and 3081 was filler machine using
whatever stuff they happened to have handy.

At the time of the 3033, I had gotten involved in a 16-way SMP 370
machine that everybody thot was fantastic. We even suckered the
processor engineers doing the 3033 to work on it in their spare time
(which was lot more interesting that the 168-3 logic remap). That is
until somebody mentioned to the head of POK that it might be decades
before the POK favorite son operating system, MVS had effective 16-way
SMP support. Then several of us were told to never visit POK again
... and the 3033 processor engineers to get nose to the grindstone and
don't do anything else until 3033 was out the door. some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

some of the 3090 processor engineers (previously 3033, & 168)
complained about vector being pure marketing. They said they had
worked very hard to make 3090 scalar floating point run as fast as the
memory bus. one of the motivations for vector in the past was that
floating point units were so slow ... that standard memory bus could
keep large number of (vector) floating point units fed. (trivia the
processor engineers would let me sneak into POK even tho I had been
directed to never visit POK again)

the other thing added to 3090 was expanded store. to get all the
memory they wanted, physical packaging increased access latency larger
than processor profile. They created a very wide memory bus for
expanded store that moved 4k bytes very efficiently with synchronous
instructions between expanded store and (normal) processor memory.

Lots of scientific&vector market had moved to HIPPI (100mbyte/sec
standards version of cray channel) and disk arrays. 3090 channels
couldn't handle the 100mbyte/sec disk arrays ... the only thing that
was fast enough was the expanded store bus ... so they kluged a HIPPI
peak/poke API into the side of of expanded store with reserved
addresses for doing HIPPI I/O data transfers.

I had gotten sucked into some industry efforts into different kind of
channels in 1980. Then industry tried to get IBM to release the
support to customers ... but there was a group in POK that objected
(because they were afraid it might interfere releasing some stuff they
were working on). Then I got sucked into some of the LANL
standardization stuff for HIPPI and then in 1988 was asked to help
LLNL standardize some serial stuff they had ... which quickly becomes
fibre-channel sttandard (including some stuff from 1980). Finally the
POK stuff is released with ES/9000 as ESCON when it is already
obsolete.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#escon

Then some channel engineers become involved with defining a heavy
weight protocol for fibre-channel that enormously cuts the native
throughput that is eventually released as FICON.

More recently IBM published a mainframe peak I/O throughput benchmark
that got 2M IOPS using 104 FICON (running on 104 fibre-channel). About
the same time, a fibre-channel was announced for e5-2600 blade
claiming over 1M IOPS native throughput (two such fibre-channel have
higher throughput than 104 fibre-channel running as FICON). some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

The 3081 was suppose to be multiprocessor only. However ACP/TPF didn't
have tightly-coupled SMP multiprocessor support and they were afraid
that all the ACP/TPF customers would move to clone processors that
were coming out with faster single processor machines. Finally they
were forced to come out with 3083 (a 3081 with one of the processors
removed). There was enormous amount of tweaking done for 3083 trying
to make it attractive to the ACP/TPF market (although others also
ordered it).

It turns out that the easiest would have been to remove the 2nd
processor ... but it was in the middle of the box, which would have
made the box dangerously top-heavy. They had to move the top processor
to the middle of the box and do the appropriate rewiring.

In part because had been sucked into doing some fast I/O industry
stuff in 1980 ... then also got con'ed into working with the director
of NSF to interconnect the NSF supercomputer centers in the early 80s
... and was suppose to get $20M from NSF. Some old email from period
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

Then congress cut the budget, some other things happen and finally
they release RFP (based on what we already had running, including
requirement for T1 links). Internal politics prevent us from
bidding. The director of NSF tries to help and writes the corporation
a letter copying the CEO ... but that just makes the internal politics
worse (including comments that what we already had running was at
least 5yrs ahead of RFP responses). The winning bid puts in
440kbit/sec links and then to make it look like they meet the RFP
requirements, they put in T1 trunks with telco multioplexors running
mulltiple 440kbit/sec links over T1 trunks. As regional networks
connect into the centers, it morphs into the NSFNET backbone precursor
to modern internet. some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

The original mainframe TCP/IP product has some issue and only gets
44kbytes/sec using nearly whole 3090 cpu. I do the changes to support
RFP1044 and in some tuning tests at Cray Research between Cray and
4341, get 4341 channel media sustained throughput using only modest
amount of 4341 processor (about 500 times improvement in bytes moved
per instruction executed) Some Some past RFC1044 posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

POK considered 4341 such a threat to 3033 that at one point they got
corporate to cut the allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing
component in half. A datacenter cluster of 4341 had more processing
and I/O capacity than 3033, was way cheaper and much smaller
environmental and space footprint. The small environmental & space
footprint also resulted in big explosion being placed out in
departmental areas ... the leading edge of the distributed computing
tsunami.

I was con'ed into playing disk engineer in bldgs 14&15. Bldg. 15 disk
product test lab tended to get first engineering machines after the
processor engineers, they had ver early 3033 and 4341. some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

Because I did a lot of work for bldgs 14&15, I got a lot of privileges
to play with their equipment ... In the 70s, I got con'ed into doing
4341 benchmarks (because I had better machine access than most of the
people in Endicott) for LLNL that was looking at getting a compute
farm of 70 4341s (sort of leading edge of the new supercomputer
paradigm). some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341

Later MVS wanted to play in the exploding distributed computing market
... however MVS only supports CKD (to this day even though there
hasn't been real CKD manufactured for decades). The high-end disk was
3380 & CKD ... but the only mid-range disk for departmental areas was
FBA 3370. They finally had to come out with 3375 simulated CKD on
3370. MVS still had hard time playing in the market, each MVS system
requiring several humans for care&feeding .... while the distributed
market was looking at large number of systems per human (rather than
large numbers of humans per system).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

where SQL does 2-value, true/false logic. It created big problem for
unknowns and/or null values. Old discussion that null values in SQL
tended to produce the opposite of the expected results ... making it all
the more dangerous.

about the same time, I was brought in to do some of a different kind of
relational implementation ... which had interface language that directly
supported unknowns/null with 3-value logic.

Earlier in the first part of the 70s, I had written a PLI program to
ingest assembler listing ... analyze the statements, creating higher
level representation ... code paths, logic processes, "dead" code,
possible register use before set, etc ... and generate representation
using a psuedo-pascal statements.

some highly optimized cp67 kernel tmade liberal use of 3&4-way logic
with branch conditions and would appear very straight forward ... the
psuedo-pascal true/false if/then/else type logic could look very
convoluted with nesting that could go 15-levels deep.

SS Trust Fund

Baby Boomer (bubble) is four times larger than previous generation
(and twice as large as following generation). While Baby Boomers were
paying into SS Trust Fund, they were building up principal for their
retirement. However, congress has been looting the fund for all excess
over annual payouts (administration even increased SS payments in the
80s, so there was more to loot for military-industrial complex
spending). With baby boomers retiring, the annual payments into the SS
Trust Fund will be less than the annual benefits (which should be
coming out of the accumulated principal ... unfortunately have been
looted). To make up the difference, the general taxes on the following
generation will have to be increased. The missing funds now amount to
$2.8T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund

The other problem is in 2002, congress let the fiscal responsibility
act expire (required spending not exceed tax revenue). In 2010, CBO
did report that congress then cut tax revenue by $6T and increased
spending by $6T for $12T budget gap (compared to the fiscal
responsible budget, some references that last decade was the first
time taxes was cut to not pay for wars rather than increasing taxes to
pay for wars). By the middle of last decade, the US Comptroller
General was including in speeches that nobody in congress is capable
of middle school aritimatic (for how badly they are savaging the
budget). The drastic cut in tax revenue (and increase in spending) has
also resulted in debt payment pushing half trillion/year.

One analysis attributed to Greenspan, was he wanted huge federal debt
(and eliminating fiscal responsiblity act) as gift to too big to
fail ... Federal Reserve provides tens of trillions in ZIRP funds to
the too big to fail (aka loans at effectively zero interest), who
then can turn around and buy treasuries (federal debt) ... making
extra hundreds of billions.

After Bernanke replaces Greenspan, he has press conference where he
said that he assumed that too big to fail would use the tens of
trillions in ZIRP funds to lend to mainstreet, when they didn't he had
no way to force them to help mainstreet (but that didn't stop the ZIRP
funds). However, supposedly one of the reasons that Bernanke was
selected was he was student of the '29 crash and the great depression
.... but the same thing happened then, so he should have had no
expectations that anything different would happen this time.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

Disclaimer: Jan2009, I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (30s
Senate Hearings into '29 crash that resulted in Glass-Steagall
and criminal convictions) with lots of internal x-refs and URLs
corresponding to what happened this time and what happened then
(comments that the new congress might have appetite to do
something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it won't
be needed after all (comments about capital hill totally buried under
enormous mounds of wallstreet cash, somebody references that there may
be only three honest members of congress).

so picture is front panel of 360/50, not so large, largest memory size
was 512kb, so either description is wrong or they had some sort of
special add-on to get the other 512kb (IBM LCS 2361 came in 1mbyte
increments)

Qbasic

hancock4 writes:
I don't know the internals of the "Big Blue" machines vs. Z architecture.
My _guess_ is that Z is more intended to serve many users--thousands of
CICS terminals--while Big Blue is intended to focus on heavy number
crunching. I also guess that Big Blue can do math problems faster than Z.

z13 published refs is 30% more throughput than EC12 (or about 100BIPS)
with 40% more processors ... or about 710MIPS/proc

part of the issue is that memory latency when measured in count of
processor cycles ... is compareable to 60s disk access when measured
in count of 60s processor cycles.

earlier press is that half the per processor improvement from z10 to
z196 is introduction of features like out-of-order execution, branch
prediction, etc. that have been in other chips for decades ... aka
masking/compensation for increasing mismatch between memory latency
and processor speed. per processor z196 to ec12 has more features.

e5-2600v1 blade about concurrent with z196 ... 400-500+ BIPS
(depending on model). A e5-2600v3 blade is rated at 2.5 times a
e5-2600v1 blade, and e5-2600v4 blade is rated at 3.5 times a e5-2600v1
blade ... or over 1.5TIPS (single e5-2600v4 blade with processing
power of fifteen max. configured latest z13 mainframes?)

4341 was leading edge of distributed computing tsunami (large
corporations ordering hundreds at a time for placing out in
departmental areas) as well as datacenter 4341 clusters had much more
processing power and I/O capacity, much lower price, much less
physical and environmental footprint. At one point head of POK felt it
was such a threat to 3033, that he convinced corporate to cut
allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing component in half. Before
4341s first shipped, I was con'ed into doing a benchmark on 4341
engineering machine in disk product test lab (bldg. 15) for LLNL who
was looking at getting 70 for compute farm (leading edge of new
supercomputing and cloud computing paradigm). some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341past posts getting to play disk engineer in bldgs14&15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

in 1980, IBM STL was growing fast and had to move 300 people from the
IMS group to offsite building (with computer access back into the STL
datacenter). They looked at "remote" 3270 support ... but found the
human factors totally unacceptable. I got sucked into do channel
extension support for local channel attached 3270 controllers at the
remote building. Optimization with downloading channel programs to the
remote end for execution help eliminate enormous latency in channel
protocol chatter ... and they didn't notice between "local" 3270
channel operation at the remote end ... and "local" 3270 channel
operation in STL. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#channel.extender

The hardware vendor tried to get IBM to release my support for the
channel extender ... but there was group in POK that objected ... they
were afraid that it would make it harder to justify getting some
serial stuff they were playing with, released.

In 1988, I'm asked to help LLNL get some serial stuff they had
standardized, which quickly morphs into fibre-channel standard
... including lots of stuff to minimize round-trip protocol chatter
latency.

Later some POK engineers get involved in fibre-channel standard and
define a heavy-weight protocol that drastically reduces native
throughput, which is finally released as FICON. IBM publishes a "peak
i/o" benchmark for z196 that uses 104 FICON (over 104 fibre-channel)
getting 2M IOPS. About the same time, there is a fibre-channel
announced for e5-2600v1 blade claiming over 1M IOPS (two such
fibre-channel have higher throughput than 104 FICON running over 104
fibre-channel). some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

Qbasic

David Wade <dave.g4ugm@gmail.com> writes:
IBM already had CMS which uses human understandable commands like
"COPYFILE" "ERASE" and is pretty similar to MS-DOS in many
ways. However don't think even that doesn't well in 256K memory.

went to the 5th flr and did Multics (some bell labs people were also
involved, but then went back home a did unix ... billed as a simplified
multics), others went to the science center on the 4th flr and did
cp40/cms (on modified 256kbyte 360/40 with virtual memory hardware added), and
then cp67/cms (when standard virtual memory 360/67 became available),
GML, and bunch of other stuff. past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

CP67/cms eventually morphs into vm370/cms (changing name of cambridge
monitor system to conversational monitor system). for quite some time,
default virtual memory size for cms was 256kbyte ... and originally cms
would run on 256kbyte real 360 (w/o cp40 or cp67).

some cp67/cms ran on 256kbyte 360/67, but more typically 512kbyte or
768kbyte. cp67 kernel was getting a little bloated ... and i did
modifications the summer of 1969 to make part of the cp67 kernel
pageable ... reducing fixed real storage requirements, making it more
efficient on smaller real memory machines (but never shipped in the
standard cp67/cms to customers). Morph to vm370/cms simplified a bunch
of cp67/cms and dropped many of the things I had done in the 60s ... but
did pick up the pageable kernel changes ... however, other things
bloated, so that it was only officially approved for minimum 512kbyte
machines. For some 370/125 customers, I did do some of the additional
cp67/cms pageable kernel changes that made it run better in 256kbyte
machine.

and mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipeline contributed to
decision to pick up a lot of the stuff that I had been doing and release
in standard product ... except for CMS paged mapped filesystem some of
the more complex stuff moving managing virtual memory, including moving
additions vm370 data structures structures to paging store. One of the
BU students graduates and joins IDC where he re-implements the page
mapped filesystem, virtual memory management and moving VM370 kernel
data structures to paging store. He also did added single system image
cluster support and the ability to migrate running CMS users between
loosely-coupled systems in cluster complex. This was in the days when
IBM scheduled maintenance required taking systems offline ... migrating
running users made it possibly to have 7x24 operations and
non-disruptive take systems offline for maintenance.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#online

both NCSS and IDC had quickly moved up value chain offering financial
services. I've commented that IDC was briefly mentioned in Jan2009 when
there was still the fiction that TARP funds were to buy too big to
fail off-book toxic assets and IDC would help value those assets ...
however, only $700B had been appropriated for TARP and just the four
largest too big to fail were still carrying $5.2T at the end of 2008
(wasn't enough to buy at face value, almost enough to buy at the going
rate of 22cents on the dollar, but then all those institutions would
have to be declared insolvent and be liquidated).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-failhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Summer of 1968, the science center gives a week cp67/cms class in
Century City (california) which the univ. sends me to. Primary person to
give CP67 classes gave notice the friday before that he was leaving to
join NCSS. When I arrive on Sunday, science center asks me to give part
of the cp67 class.

Qbasic

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
VM needs a LOT less memory than MVS. My guess is that you could run a
reasonable system in 64K (Lynn?) I know that on the same size machine VM
ran much better than MVS/TSO.

Part of CMS issue was that it got increasingly bloated over the years
... and was also dependent on mainstream OS/360(MVS) applications ported
to CMS. Endicott did XT/370 ... a couple 68k processors emulating some
part of 370 running modified vm370 (with CMS) ... I/O was done by
interprocessor messages with cp88 running on the 8088 processor ... it
initially only had 384k "real memory". I did some number of "benchmarks"
show extreme page thrashing ... because of the bloated memory
requirements for compilers and assemblers. As a result they kludged an
extra 128k on the memory card ... giving 512kbytes ... which helped to
reduce the worst of the page thrashing.

However, the 370 applications still tended to be relatively disk
instensive (even w/o page thrashing) ... running on xt/370 compared
poorly with applications implemented for the pc/xt environment. A CMS
disk i/o required interprocessor message to cp88 which then did the i/o
on the native XT 100ms/access hard drive. Applications native for PC/XT
optimized for much less disk i/o per operation.

MVS/TSO was significantly more bloated than VM370/CMS, much longer
pathlengths, much less efficient system algorithms. CMS had some number
of much more efficient native applications like editor ... but the
compilers and assemblers were just ported to CMS from os360/MVS.

CMS (& CP67 & vm370) I/O was much more efficient than OS360/MVS (but
applications mainframe disks were much faster than PC disks ... so
applications weren't as sensitive to optimization).

Late 70s, IBM San Jose Research had environment with MVS 370/168 and
VM370 370/158 with all 3330 disk strings connected to both machines
... but strict rules that MVS 3330 disks would never be mounted on vm370
"strings". One day they accidentally violated the rule and the
datacenter almost got phone calls from users complaining about CMS
response horribly degraded. The issue is os360/MVS environment makes
heavy use of multi-track search ... which can tie-up channel, controller
and disks for up to 1/3sec at a time. MVS multi-track search on VM370
string will lockout the vm370 "dedicated" controller ... having
disastrous effects on CMS response. We immediately demanded that the MVS
3330 disk be moved to MVS string ... and MVS operations said they would
do it 2nd shift (this was around 10am).

We had enormously optimized VS1 for running under vm370 ... that ran
faster under loaded vm370 on 370/158 than MVS ran on 370/168. We put its
3330 up on MVS string and were able to bring the MVS system to its knees
with multi-track searches (and CMS response almost returns to
normal). MVS operations then agreed to immediately move the MVS 3330, if
we moved the VS1 3330.

Besides all the significant performance issues with MVS/TSO ... a
significant part of TSO response is significantly hurt by the underlying
MVS use of multi-track search. Some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

footnote on 360/67 SLT instruction
"The 360/67 SLT instruction RPQ was designed at Lincoln by Jack
Nolan. He was interested in using it for database list processing. Once
it was implemented, IBM found use for it to process lists in the CP
nucleus. I don't know if it was ever used by TSS or for any applications
program." (J.M. Winett, private communication, 1990.)

... snip ...

footnotes on two cp67 commercial timesharing companies (Arnow was
director of computing at Lincoln):
Almost immediately after that, two "spinoff" companies were formed by
former employees of Lincoln Lab, Union Carbide, and the IBM Cambridge
Scientific Center, to provide commercial services based on CP/CMS. Dick
Bayles, Mike Field, Hal Feinleib, and Bob Jay went to the company that
became National CSS.

Harit Nanavati, Bob Seawright, Jack Arnow, Frank Belvin, and Jim March
went to IDC (Interactive Data Corporation). Although the loss of so many
talented people was a blow, the CSC people felt that the success of the
two new companies greatly increased the credibility of CP-67
... snip ...

Bob Seawright was from Union Carbide and his wife was IBM SE on the
account, they both are assigned to Cambridge Science Center for
CP67/CMS. Bob does a customized version os/360 for running in cp67
virtual machine ... somewhat CMS'ized with some cms-style commands and
interactions at the os/360 "operetor's console".

Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

"In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report,
critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in
Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to
make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to
be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about
insiders: 'They don't criticize other insiders.'"

Query: Will modern z/OS and z/VM classes suffice for MVS and VM/370

RichA@LIVINGCOMPUTERMUSEUM.ORG (Rich Alderson) writes:
We are currently in the process of restoring a 4341 to operating
condition. We have just last week corrected a fault in the power
system, and are able to power the system up and IML it from floppy.

We are now deciding what operating system to run on the restored
system. Most likely, we will run VM/370, but possibly we will run an
MVS guest as well. I used to be an MVS systems programmer, but that
was more than 30 years ago, and even the rust has eroded away.

I would like to brush up on operations and systems programming, which
would be much simpler if a modern z/OS and/or z/VM course would
suffice for the older operating systems. Have the operator commands
and programming utilities changed radically since 1984 (JES2, CMS)?

Please feel free to reply privately if you wish to tell me how foolish this sounds.

4341 was leading edge of distributed computing tsunami (large
corporations ordering hundreds at a time for placing out in
departmental areas) as well as datacenter 4341 clusters had much more
processing power and I/O capacity, much lower price, much less
physical and environmental footprint. At one point head of POK felt it
was such a threat to 3033, that he convinced corporate to cut
allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing component in half. Before
4341s first shipped, I was con'ed into doing a benchmark on 4341
engineering machine in disk product test lab (bldg. 15) for LLNL who
was looking at getting 70 for compute farm (leading edge of new
supercomputing and cloud computing paradigm).

Late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at communication
group world-wide internal annual conference supposedly on 3174
performance ... however he opened the talk with the statement that the
communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the
disk division. The issue was that the communication group had strangle
hold on datacenters with its corporate strategic ownership of
everything that crossed the datacenter wall and was fighting off
distributed computing and client/server trying to preserve its
(emulated) dumb terminal paradigm and install base. The disk division
was seeing data fleeing to more distributed computing friendly
platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with
a number of solutions to reverse the trend, but they were constantly
vetoed by the communication group. A few short years later the company
has gone in the red and was being reorganized into the 13 "baby blues"
in preparation for breaking up the company (the board then brings in
new CEO to resurrect the company and reverse the breakup).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

towards the mid-80s one of the POK executives gave presentation that
11,000 vax sales should have been 4341. Note however (as mentioned
upthread), POK had felt that 4341 clusters in datacenters were such a
threat to 3033s, at one point they convinced corporate to cut
allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing component in half (4341
cluster had much more processing power & I/O capacity than 3033 at
much lower cost as well as significantly less floor space and
environmental requirements).

Or that just 45-days ago a new law went into effect authorizing the
government to strip you of your passport if they believe in their sole
discretion that you owe them too much tax.

... snip ...

Which is interesting since after congress allows the fiscal
responsibility act to expire in 2002, they radically cut taxes ($6T
2003-2010; at same time increasing spending for wars, $12T budget gap
2003-2010 compared to fiscal responsibility budget, those taxes have
yet to be restored, possibly only time taxes were cut to not pay for
wars instead of increasing taxes to pay for them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAYGO

In spite of the huge amount of legal tax evasion, in 2009 IRS said
that they were going after 52,000 wealthy Americans guilty of $400B in
(illegal) tax evasion by hiding income overseas. In spring of 2011,
the new congress said that it was cutting the IRS budget for
recovering that $400B. Since then there has been reports of the too
big to fail paying several billions in fines for illegally moving
trillions overseas (but nothing about recovery of $400B in unpaid
taxes on those trillions).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasionand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-fail

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
32-bit x86 processors supported 36 bits of PA, since the pentium pro, if
not earlier. Thats 16GB of RAM on the computer. Granted, a single application
was limited to a 4GB address space, but there were ways around that
(e.g. Unixware had a windowing scheme).

Gimick used in late 70s with 3033 & 3081. 370 page table was 16 bits,
12bit (4kbyte) page number, 2 flag bits and two unused/reserved bits. 370 was
24bit addressing ... but MVS bloat and increasing need to use real
memory for caching to compensate for disks relative system throughput
decreasing ... they were banging against the 16mbyte (real limit).

They scavanged the two unused pagetable bits and prefixed it to the page
number to get 14bit page number of 64mbytes real storage. They then used
fullword IDALs ... which were originally introduced to get around timing
problem with scattere/gather ... IBM channel protocol specified no CCW
prefetch and CCW only had 24bit address field ... it CCW was executed
synchronously before chaining to the next CCW. 360 used chained data to
scatter/gather ... but had lots of timing issues. Move to all virtual
memory resulted in nearly every CCW that previously was contiguous could
no morph into scatter/gather because of crossing virtual page boundary
... and the virtual pages not contiguous in real memory. IDALs addresses
could be prefetched to eliminate the timing problems with synchronous
data chaining CCWs. Fortunately for 64mbyte feature, IDALs were
fullword so it was easy to extend to doing I/O in the >16mbyte area.

There was still an issue that the actual CCWs (and IDALs) had to reside
in the <16mbyte area ... but could do I/O (especially paging) into the
>16mbyte area.

Each virtual address space was still limited to 16mbytes ... and virtual
& real addresses were limited to 16mbytes ... but pagetables could morph
a 24bit/16mbyte virtual address into a 26bit/64mbyte real address
... but there could be a large number of different virtual address
spaces.

VM370 had an issue since the kernel still had issue with accessing parts
of virtual address pages in kernel real address mode ... and it would be
unable to access contents of virtual page in the >16mbyte area. The
vm370 group developed a "bring-down" strategy where they would move a
virtual page from >16mbyte area below the line to the <16mbyte area
... by writing the page out (above the line) to disk and then reading it
back in below the 16mbyte line. I then gave them a hack which filled in
a dummy pagetable with address of the page above the 16mbyte line and
page below the 16mbyte line ... dropped into virtual mode and MVCL of
the page from above the line to below the line and then returned to real
mode. More complicated was hack to play games with kernel accessing in
virtual mode the virtual page information.

They also had other problems modifying how they treated the above and
below line areas for page replacement.

base architecture for 370-xa had 31bit virtual addressing and access
registers ... which allowed code running in one address space to access
areas in other address spaces. Eventually a subset of access registers
was also retrifitted to 3033 as "dual-address space mode".

Ransomware

usenet@only.tnx (Questor) writes:
We have been there for over forty years. I have seen two supposedly
identical mainframe machines, with identical software builds, and the
same general user load, behave in two distinctly different manners.
Computers are still finite, but their complexity in terms of being able
to reliably predict all outputs from given inputs surpassed us long ago.

... was that policy decisions tended to be indirectly connected with
activities ... they used indications that were only loosely correlated
with activity ... which tended to work one way when the correlation held
and totally different ways when there were small changes and the
relationships weren't valid.

I spent a lot of time making sure that the policy decisions were based
on direct measures of activity ... which went a long ways towards
eliminating random results.

Work was picked up and shipped in standard cp67. In the morph of cp67 to
vm370, a lot of stuff was simplified and dropped from cp67 ... including
my dynamic adaptive resource management.

some of it eventually evolves into capacity planning. another part was
analytical performance model implemented in APL. A version of this was
made available on the worldwide online sales&marketing support HONE
system
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

as the performance predictor ... a IBM customer support person could
enter chatacterization of the customer's workload and configuration
... and enter what-if scenarios about what happens when the
configuration and/or workload changes.

With the failure of FS, there was mad rush to get things back into 370
product pipelines ... which contributed to picking up some of the stuff
I had been doing and releasing to customers. Part of the stuff was
picked up and shipped in standard vm370 version 3.

The lack of products during the FS period is credited with giving the
clone processor makers a market foothold. With death of FS (mid-70s) and
resumption of 370 products (and rise of clone processors) there was
decision to transition to charging for kernel software. My dynamic
adaptive resource management was selected to be guinea pig for this
... packaged as a separately charged for kernel component.

As part of getting reading for release of this "resource manager" we ran
a set of 2000 benchmarks that took three months elapsed time. To start
with a complex array of observed internal and customer configurations
and workloads was defined ... sort of represented as a multiple axis
irregularly shaped sphere. We chose regular set of configurations and
workloads that regularly covered the inside of this sphere plus a large
number of configurationn+workloads that were way outside all observed
points ... for the first 1000 benchmarks. All of this was feed into a
modified version of performance predictor ... which would compare its
predicted benchmark results against the measured results. Then
performance predictor was modified to chose the final 1000
configuration+workload benchmarks ... based on results of the previous
benchmarks ... searching for possible anomolies.

trivia: early in the vm370 automated benchmarking with initial convesion
from cp67 ... the extreme benchmarking with configuration&workloads way
outside normal operations would regularly crash vm370. I had to
completely rewrite the vm370 serialization mechanisms before I was able
to reliable run extreme vm370 benchmarks (which was included in the
"resource manager" product when it shipped).

other trivia: doing some performance work at a (very) large mainframe
customer (several dozen of max. configurated IBM mainframes) around the
turn of the century ... I ran into somebody that was using a descendant
of the performance predictor in performance consulting business. After
IBM problems of the early 90s, IBM was spinning off all sorts of things.
This person had obtained the rights to a descendant of the performance
predictor and ran it through a APL->C language convertor.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Ransomware

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
Look at the current Apple vs. FBI dustup. Apparently the FBI expects Apple
to develop code to break the encryption on an iPhone. I think I come down
on the side of privacy, but the other side has some valid arguments too.

in the past hardware reverse engineering technologies have been used to
to recover such information ... and for single use should be less
expensive than what they are asking Apple to do. It would seem to be
justified assuming they were planning on wide spread use.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Ransomware

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
The Target thing was an inside job by the company that supported their POS
terminals (IIRC). I think someone inserted a trojan into a software
update.

we had been brought in as consultants to small client/server startup
that wanted to do payment transactions on their server, they had also
invented this technology they called "SSL" they wanted to use, the
result is now somewhat called "electronic commerce".

Somewhat for having done "electronic commerce", in the mid-90s we were
asked to be on the x9a10 financial standard working group that had been
given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial
infrastructure for all retail payments. as part of that effort we did
end-to-end threat and vulnerability analysis on number of different
kinds of payments. We eventually came up with a financial transaction
standard that slightly tweaked the current paradigm and eliminated the
ability to use information from previous electronic transaction to
perform fraudulent financial transactions ... and therefor eliminated
the need to encrypt or hide that information as well as threat of
information being stolen in breaches (I've periodically posted here
possible explanations about why it has yet to be deployed).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

Since then we were tangentially involved in the (original) cal state
breach notification legislation ... we had been brought in to help
wordsmith the cal. state electronic signature act and lots of the
players were heavily involved in privacy issues and had done detailed
public surveys.

The #1 issue was fraudulent financial transactions (as result of
breaches, skimming, etc taken from previous transactions) about which
little or nothing was being done. The issue is institutions normally
take security and countermeasures in self-defense ... however in this
case, the institution wasn't at risk, it was the public. It was hoped
that the (adverse) publicity from the breach notifications would
motivate corrective action.

dating back to well into last century, there have been cases of criminal
organizations compromising makers of POS terminals and ATM cash machines
and inserting skimming at time of manufacture.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Failure as a Way of Life; The logic of lost wars and military-industrial boondoggles

Failure as a Way of Life; The logic of lost wars and
military-industrial boondoggles
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/failure-as-a-way-of-life/
This completes the loop in what is a classic closed system, where the
outside world does not matter and is not allowed to intrude. Col. John
Boyd, America's greatest military theorist, said that all closed
systems collapse. The Washington establishment cannot adjust, it
cannot adapt, it cannot learn. It cannot escape serial failure.

20yrs ago we had effectively consulted (almost) for free with Census
on dataprocessing modernization for yearr 2000 census (when they got
audited, I had to stand up in front of the room all day answering
questions). We then offered to do something similar for Veterans
... we met with the head congressional staffer for VA ... VA was just
coming off couple billion dollar failed dataprocessing modernization
effort and gearing up for another. However, such offers can be one of
the greatest threats to beltway bandits.

In 2002, we get a call asking us to respond to unclassified BAA
released by IC-ARDA (since renamed IARPA) which was closing that day
and had no other responses; basically said that none of the tools they
had did the job. We get in a response and then have a number of
meetings demonstrating that we could do what was required (a little
stilted since I don't have a clearance) ... and then all goes quiet,
no more communication. Later when Success Of Failure comes out, we
figure we were on the "wrong" side of the issue.

which has an large overlap with "is Harvard responsible for rise of
Putin": John Helmer: Convicted Fraudster Jonathan Hay, Harvard's Man
Who Wrecked Russia, Resurfaces in Ukraine
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/convicted-fraudster-jonathan-hay-harvards-man-who-wrecked-russia-resurfaces-in-ukraine.html
If you are unfamiliar with this fiasco, which was also the true
proximate cause of Larry Summers' ouster from Harvard, you must read
an extraordinary expose, How Harvard Lost Russia, from Institutional
Investor. I am told copies of this article were stuffed in every
Harvard faculty member's inbox the day Summers got a vote of no
confidence and resigned shortly thereafter.

... snip ...

How Harvard lost Russia; The best and brightest of America's premier
university came to Moscow in the 1990s to teach Russians how to be
capitalists. This is the inside story of how their efforts led to
scandal and disgrace.
http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/1020662/How-Harvard-lost-Russia.html
Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

loc6265-74:
XXX. THE LEAGUE TO PERPETUATE WAR The war has just begun. I said that
when the Armistice terms were published and when I read the Treaty and
the League Covenant I felt more than ever convinced of the justice of
my conclusion. The Treaty of Versailles is merely an armistice -- a
suspension of hostilities, while the combatants get their wind. There
is a war in every chapter of the Treaty and in every section of the
League Covenant; war all over the world; war without end so long as
the conditions endure which produce these documents.

John Foster Dulles played major role in rebuilding Germany's economy
and military during 20s&30s. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen
Dulles, and Their Secret World War,

loc865-68:
In mid-1931 a consortium of American banks, eager to safeguard their
investments in Germany, persuaded the German government to accept a
loan of nearly $500 million to prevent default. Foster was their
agent. His ties to the German government tightened after Hitler took
power at the beginning of 1933 and appointed Foster's old friend
Hjalmar Schacht as minister of economics.

loc873-79:
Sullivan & Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the
giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp A.G., extended
I.G. Farben's global reach, and fought successfully to block Canada's
effort to restrict the export of steel to German arms makers.

loc905-7:
Foster was stunned by his brother's suggestion that Sullivan &
Cromwell quit Germany. Many of his clients with interests there,
including not just banks but corporations like Standard Oil and
General Electric, wished Sullivan & Cromwell to remain active
regardless of political conditions.

loc938-40:
At least one other senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Eustace
Seligman, was equally disturbed. In October 1939, six weeks after the
Nazi invasion of Poland, he took the extraordinary step of sending
Foster a formal memorandum disavowing what his old friend was saying
about Nazism

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Ransomware

"hgww" <hgww@gmail.com> writes:
That isn't reverse engineering, there is no
reverse involved, it's just disassembly.

original post was "reverse engineering technologies" ... which starts
with pealing all the pieces apart (or disassembly). getting down to
chips ... they may even very carefully peal away chip layers and
measuring charges in cells.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Nobody saw the economic mess coming last decade

Somebody on Bloomberg this morning commented that nobody saw the
economic mess coming last decade.

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (posterchild were office bldgs in Dallas/Ft.Worth
area that turned out to be empty lots). In the late 90s, I was asked
to try and help avoid the coming economic mess by looking at improving
the integrity of supporting documents as countermeasures (FED LEOs
explained that many of the investment bankers walking away clean from
the S&L crisis were then involved in manipulating Internet IPOs and
were predicted to get into mortgages next). Then loan originators were
securitizing loans&mortgages and paying for triple-A ratings (when
both the sellers and the rating agencies knew they weren't worth
triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional testimony). Triple-A rating
trumps supporting documentation and they can start doing
no-documentation liar loans. Being able to pay for triple-A eliminated
any reason for loan originators to care about borrowers'
qualifications or loan quality, they could sell off (all loans as fast
as they could be made) to customers restricted to dealing in "safe"
investments (like large pension funds, claim is it accounts for 30%
loss in funds and trillions shortfall for pensions), largely enabling
the more than $27T done 2001-2008
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Jan2009 (a decade after being asked to try and help prevent the coming
economic mess), I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (30s
senate hearings into the '29 crash, resulted in Glass-Steagall
and lots of criminal convictions) with lots of internal cross-refs and
URLs between what happened then and what happened this time (comments
that the new congress might have appetite to do something). I work on
it for awhile and then get a call that it won't be needed after all
(reference to capital hill totally buried under enormous piles of
wallstreet cash, and there now be only 3 honest members in congress).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

S&L crisis had 30,000 criminal referral and 1,000 criminal
convictions. The economic mess was 70 times larger than the S&L
crisis has had no criminal convictions (proportionally there should
have been 70,000 criminal convictions).

Last decade, the administration regulatory agencies turned blind eye
to all the criminal behavior. This decade the whole federal
infrastructure is pretending it didn't exist. Local DC press will now
sometimes refer to congress as Kabuki Theater ... what you see
publicly is just facade (including party bickering) and has little to
do with what is really going on.

i've familiar with lots of stuff related of the "Big Short"
book. however it glosses over some of the stuff. There was over $27T
in (triple-A rated) toxic CDOs done 2001-2008 (when sellers
were paying for triple-A ratings even when both seller and the rating
agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

Initially the triple-A rating eliminated any reason to care about
borrowers qualifications or loan quality (one way or another). But
then they realize that they could specifally design toxic CDOs
to fail, buy triple-A rating, sell to their victims and then take out
CDS gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for
dodgy loans).

When things imploded the sec. of treasury supposedly convinced
congress to allocate $700B for TARP funds to purchase toxic
assets. However, at the end of 2008, just the four largest too big
to fail were still carrying $5.2T in toxic assets "off-book" (that
had been selling at 22cents on the dollar). The $700B doesn't even
come close to buying the $5.2T at face value ... and if bought at
22cents on the dollar, the institutions would have to be declared
insolvent and forced to be liquidated.

Also note that the largest holder of CDS gambling bets was AIG and
negotiating to pay off at 50cents on the dollar, when the sec. of
treasury steps in, says that they have to sign a document that they
can't sue those making the bets and forced to take TARP funds to pay
off at face-value. The largest recipient of TARP funds is AIG and the
largest recipient of face-value payoffs is the firm formally headed by
the sec. of treasury (which may have been the purpose of TARP funds
all along).

To real bailout was the Federal Reserve loaning the too big to
fail tens of trillions in ZIRP funds (zero interest) and buying
their trillions in off-book toxic assets at 98cents on the dollar.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

There was something of head fake in Jan2009 when there was still a
facade that they would use TARP to buy the off-book toxic assets. They
were complaining that it was enormously difficult to value CDOs
because the number of complicated mortgages all packaged together. But
one of the biggest reasons that they were hard to "value" was that
they were no-documentation, liar loans ... and w/o documentation it is
almost impossible to figure out what it is you are dealing with.

pg77/loc1257-59:
When Rubin left to cash in on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Clinton
nominated Lawrence Summers to fill the post and reappointed Ayn Rand
fanboy Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

pg77/loc1259-60:
When Brooksley Born, Clinton's chairman of the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission, proposed to regulate the derivatives market, she
was crushed by the troika of Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers.

Responsible for GLBA and repeal of Glass-Steagall, Brooksley Born was
quickly replaced by Gramm's wife blocking CDS regulation while Gramm
got provision added that prevented CDS regulation (described as favor
to ENRON which was playing with CDS at the time). She then resigns and
joins ENRON board and the audit committee. CDS gambling was later
responsible for changing triple-A rated toxic CDOs from not caring
about loan quality to designing toxic CDOs to fail and taking out CDS
gambling bets that they would fail.

and another presides over the financial mess, 70 times larger than S&L
crisis.

pg57/loc931-33:
It only remained for his Republican successor, George W. Bush, to push
through further tax cuts and anesthetize the Securities and Exchange
Commission by appointing as chairman a useful idiot, former Republican
congressman Chris Cox, for the completion of the deregulation process.

Rhetoric in Congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future
ENRONs and guarantee that executives and auditors did jail time, but
it required that SEC do something. Possibly because even GAO didn't
believe SEC was doing anything, it started doing reports of fraudulent
public company financial filines, even showing increase after SOX goes
into effect (and nobody doing jailtime).

It's possible, of course, for authorities to physically open the
phone, pull out the computer chips and bombard them with lasers or radio
frequencies to get at the information they need

...snip ...

pealing chips and using scanning electron microscope for reverse
engineering has been an issue for a number of decades. Past couple
decades discussions have been about using the technique for attacks to
compromise security chips. IBM Los Gatos VLSI lab had originally
pioneered the technique for debugging chips (as opposed to reverse
engineering). trivia, long ago and far away, I use to have a wing of
offices and labs at the Los Gatos lab.

trivia: 90s, I was saying that I would take a $500milspec chip, cost
reduce it by 2-3 orders of magnitude while making it more secure. I
was on panel discussion with several CSOs in ballroom standing room
only at:
http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/index.html

Earlier in the 90s, the gov. was pushing hard for Key Escrow ... all
keys had to be registered. I was member of the Key Escrow committee
... one of the last meetings was where I showed that private keys for
digital signature use couldn't be escrowed because it would violate
fundamental "PAIN" requirements, their response was people could cheat
and use digital signature private keys for encryption. That was about
the end of Key Escrow effort.

Windows 10 forceful update?

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
I did download drivers for my Brother printer from their site,
commercial linux software seems to be mostly download and activate but
certainly compared to the downloadable crud for Windows there's very little
and what there is tends to be high quality.

i recently got new epson scanner and downloaded the drivers ... but my
linux software didn't have some features that the apple scanning
software has (place multiple negatives on the scanner, automatically
recognize the different negatives and split into different image
files). however, the apple software on cdrom that came with the scanner
wouldn't work, so he had to download the latest version anyway.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Ransomware

Ibmekon <Ibmekon> writes:
Frightening though to consider, Snowden suggested that some 4 million
Americans, maybe half a million contractors, had security clearance to
read all the worlds emails.

part of the problem was Snowden was an employee of private-equity
(former AMEX president and former head of IBM, left IBM to head up the
private equity entity) subsidiary and security clearances and background
checks had been outsourced to other private-equity subsidiaries
... which were found to just filling out paperwork and not actually
doing background checks. Private-equity subsidiaries have been found to
be under enormous pressure to generate money every way possible.

Early Unixes requirements

"Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> writes:
Edwin Land was a genius and a great manager. He was able to obtain
lots of disparate parts and substances needed to create his SX-70 film
packs, and some substances today would be "unobtainium". When there
was an effort to re-create SX-70 film, a new formulation had to be
designed.

You should check out Edwin Land's articles in the "Scientific
American" magazine.

Land was a hero of Steve Jobs. ISTM that Steve actually got to sit
next to Land at a special group dinner somewhere.

trivia ... our offices on 4th flr 545 tech sq ... overlooked Land's 2nd
flr balcony in the two story bldg in the center of tech sq. once he was
doing a demo on the balcony of what turned out to be the sx70 (before it
was announced).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

ASCII vs. EBCDIC (was Re: On sort options ...)

0000000a2a8c2020-dmarc-request@LISTSERV.UA.EDU (Tom Marchant) writes:
ASCII was seriously considered for the initial System/360
design. Amdahl, Blaauw and Brooks published an article in the IBM
Journal in April, 1964, titled "Architecture of the System/360" in
which many of the design trade-offs were described. One place where
the article can be found is
http://web.ece.ucdavis.edu/~vojin/CLASSES/EEC272/S2005/Papers/IBM360-Amdahl_april64.pdf

<quote>
ASCII vs BCD codes. The selection of the 8-bit character size in
1961 proved wise by 1963, when the American Standards Association
adopted a 7-bit standard character code for information interchange
(ASCII). This 7-bit code is now under final consideration by the
International Standards Organization for adoption as an
international standards recommendation. The question became 'Why not
adopt ASCII as the only internal code for System/360

The reasons against such exclusive adoption was the widespread use
of the BCD code derived from and easily translated to the IBM card
code. To facilitate use of both codes, the central processing units
are designed with a high degree of code independence, with
generalized code translation facilities, and with program-selectable
BCD or ASCII modes for code-dependent instructions. Nevertheless, a
choice had to be made for the code-sensitive I/O devices and for
programming support, and the solution was to offer both codes, as a
user option. Systems with either option will, of course, easily read
or write I/O media with the other code.
</quote>

The culprit was T. Vincent Learson. The only thing for his defense is
that he had no idea of what he had done. It was when he was an IBM Vice
President, prior to tenure as Chairman of the Board, those lofty
positions where you believe that, if you order it done, it actually will
be done. I've mentioned this fiasco elsewhere. Here are some direct
extracts:

... snip, see reference for a whole lot more ...

There as been problems with my ISP this weekend, so apologize if this
shows up multiple times

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Windows 10 forceful update?

Bob Martin <bob.martin@excite.com> writes:
All the major banks in London have IBM mainframes running variations
of MVS.

Lots of overnight Cobol batch settlement systems from the 60s & 70s. In the
late 70s, some of these started to be front-ended with real-time
transactions ... but final settlement was done in the overnight batch.

I've periodically mentioned that in the 90s that billions were spent to
move off overnight Cobol batch settlement to straight through
processing with large numbers of "killer micros" (motivated by
globalization both increasing the workload and decreasing the size of
overnight window). Turns out these implementations were using standard
parallization libraries that had 100 times the overhead (compared to
cobol batch). I got to point this out to some large implementations but
was totally ignored. In general they all waited to pilot implementations
before seeing them go down in flames (overhead totally swamped
anticipated throughput improvements with large numbers of killer
micros).

Middle of last decade ... I got involved with some new technology that
involved high level definition of business rules that they generated
fine grain SQL statements that were parallelized by cluster RDBMS
implementations (most RDBMS had done enormous work on efficient cluster
RDBMS parallelization) ... was able to show mirrored transactions as
straight through processing from large ibm mainframe operations that
used dozens of max configured mainframe systems doing cobol batch ... in
less elapsed time. These efficient cluster RDBMS implementations
included significant amounts of redundancy and all sorts of recovery.

We took it to major financial industry associations and initially got
lots of positive interest ... then all stopped and hit a brick wall. We
were finally told that there were still quite a few executives that bore
the scars of the 90s failures and were quite risk adverse ... it would
take another generation before new attempts would be made.

Gray is known for his groundbreaking work as a programmer, database
expert and Microsoft engineer. Gray's work helped make possible such
technologies as the cash machine, ecommerce, online ticketing, and deep
databases like Google.

June1940, Germany had a victory celebration at the Waldorf-Astoria
with major industrialists. Lots of them were there to hear how to do
business with the Nazis, Intrepid:
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Called-Intrepid-Incredible-Narrative-ebook/dp/B00V9QVE5O/
One prominent figure at the German victory celebration was Torkild
Rieber, of Texaco, whose tankers eluded the British blockade. The
company had already been warned, at Roosevelt's instigation, about
violations of the Neutrality Law. But Rieber had set up an elaborate
scheme for shipping oil and petroleum products through neutral ports
in South America. With the Germans now preparing to turn the English
Channel into what Churchill thought would become 'river of blood,'
other industrialists were eager to learn from Texaco how to do more
business with Hitler.

... snip ..

They had gotten such a bad reputation for the depression and
supporting Hitler and Nazis, at national conference held later that
year, there is proposal for big propaganda campaign to equate
corporations and Christianity

How Corporate America Invented Christian America; How one reverend's
big business-backed crusade altered the political landscape.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate-ebook/dp/B00PWX7R56/
In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression,
more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their
yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City,
convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of
Manufacturers.

John Foster Dulles played major role in rebuilding Germany's economy
and military during 20s&30s. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen
Dulles, and Their Secret World War, loc865-68:
In mid-1931 a consortium of American banks, eager to
safeguard their investments in Germany, persuaded the German
government to accept a loan of nearly $500 million to prevent
default. Foster was their agent. His ties to the German government
tightened after Hitler took power at the beginning of 1933 and
appointed Foster's old friend Hjalmar Schacht as minister of
economics.

loc873-79:
Sullivan & Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the
giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp A.G., extended
I.G. Farben's global reach, and fought successfully to block Canada's
effort to restrict the export of steel to German arms makers.

loc905-7:
Foster was stunned by his brother's suggestion that Sullivan &
Cromwell quit Germany. Many of his clients with interests there,
including not just banks but corporations like Standard Oil and
General Electric, wished Sullivan & Cromwell to remain active
regardless of political conditions.

loc938-40:
At least one other senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Eustace
Seligman, was equally disturbed. In October 1939, six weeks after the
Nazi invasion of Poland, he took the extraordinary step of sending
Foster a formal memorandum disavowing what his old friend was saying
about Nazism

... snip ...

For the 1943 US Strategic Bombing Program of Germany, they needed
military and industrial target locations, they got locations and
detailed plans from wallstreet.

Thyssen (from Prescott Bush references) ... my wife's father was
command of engineering combat group and out in front towards the end
(frequently ranking officer in enemy territory, had collection of
German officer daggers from surrenders ... all his WW2 stuff
disappeared in a home breakin a few years ago). I found his WW2 status
reports in National Archives (College Park, his China reports seem to
be some other location):

On 28 Apr we were put in D/S of the 13th Armd and 80th Inf Divs and
G/S Corps Opns. The night of the 28-29 April we cross the DANUBE River
and the next day we set-up our OP in SCHLOSS PUCHHOF (vic PUCHOFF); an
extensive structure remarkable for the depth of its carpets, the
height of its rooms, the profusion of its game, the superiority of its
plumbing and the fact that it had been owned by the original financial
backer of the NAZIS, Fritz Thyssen. Herr Thyssen was not at home.

Forward from the DANUBE the enemy had been very active, and an intact
bridge was never seen except by air reconnaissance. Maintenance of
roads and bypasses went on and 29 April we began constructing 835' of
M-2 Tdwy Br, plus a plank road approach over the ISAR River at
PLATTLING. Construction was completed at 1900 on the 30th. For the
month of April we had suffered no casualties of any kind and Die
Gotterdamerung was falling, the last days of the once mighty
WHERMACHT.

... snip ...

The purpose of patents in the constitution was to promote innovation
and protect individuals from institutions attempting to preserve the
status quo. Increasingly large institutions have perverted the patent
system to preserve their status quo and protect monopolies.

pg33:
Between 1820 and 1845, only 19 percent of patentees in the United
States had parents who were professionals or were from recognizable
major landowning families. During the same period, 40 percent of those
who took out patents had only primary schooling or less, just like
Edison. Moreover, they often exploited their patent by starting a
firm, again like Edison. Just as the United States in the nineteenth
century was more democratic politically than almost any other nation
in the world at the time, it was also more democratic than others when
it came to innovation. This was critical to its path to becoming the
most economically innovative nation in the world.

Most of the money is disappearing into US pockets (even money that
first goes overseas but then comes back ... sort of a version of
legal? money laundering). A civil engineering professor is talking to
Volcker about (long term) disappearing civil engineering programs in
US universities because of the lack of infrastructure work and lack of
work means no jobs, and no jobs mean no students are signing up for
civil engineering, From "Confidence Men":
"Well, I said, 'The trouble with the United States recently is we
spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing
a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is s*tty bridges
and a s*tty financial system!'"

which includes a Boyd book in the recommended list. I use to sponsor
Boyd's briefings at IBM and he would talk about a plane he would like
to do. When he was head of lightweight fighter plane at the Pentagon,
he was behind redesign of the F15 (cutting weight in half and vastly
improving performance, F16, F18, and A10). The F16 became heavier and
less performance than he wanted. He talked about a much less
expensive, simpler, less maintenance per flying time ... something
like 10times the flying hrs per dollar (combination of more fighters
per dollar and more flying hrs/fighter). Later the F20/Tigershark that
comes close to matching his requirement. They knew that USAF would
never buy it, but figured that they sell it overseas. However, for
every candidate country, the military-industrial complex got congress
to approve "directed appropriation" USAID that could only be used to
buy F16s. The countries would say that the F20 would be much better
for their purposes, but the choice was either using their own money to
buy F20s or get F16s "for free" (with USAID).

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War; pg9/loc205-11:
The grass was wet and the air was clean and sweet. The crowd gathered
at Section Sixty, grave site number 3,660. The Marine colonel took
from his pocket a Marine Corps insignia, the eagle globe and
anchor. He marched out of the crowd, kneeled, and placed the insignia
near the urn containing Boyd's ashes. Someone took a picture. In that
frozen moment the light of the flash sparkled on the eagle globe and
anchor, causing it to stand out sharply against the bronze urn and
green grass. The black insignia drew every eye. As one, and without a
command to do so, the young lieutenants snapped to attention. Placing
the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps on a grave is the highest honor a
Marine can bestow. It is rarely seen, even at the funeral of decorated
combat Marines, and it may have been the first time in history an Air
Force pilot received the honor.

It has region got so big it divided into administration
centers/capitals ... rome was symbolic/ceremonial pg28:
As late as AD 249 there were still only 250 senior bureaucratic
functionaries in the entire Empire. By the year 400, just 150 years
later, there were 6,000. Most operated at the major imperial
headquarters from which the key frontiers were supervised: not in
Rome, therefore, but, depending on the emperor, at Trier and/or Milan
for the Rhine, Sirmium or increasingly Constantinople for the Danube,
and Antioch for the east. It was no longer the Senate of Rome, but the
comitatensian commanders, concentrated on key frontiers, and the
senior bureaucrats, gathered in the capitals from which these
frontiers were administered, who settled the political fate of the
Empire.

... snip ...

vandals/alans cross into western africa from spain at gilbralter and
then over a period of years made their way towards Carthage
(apparently undetected), pg273:
Carthage and its agricultural hinterland were responsible for feeding
the bloated capital of Empire. But keeping the capital fed was no more
than a specific application of a much more general point. By the
fourth century AD, North Africa had become the economic powerhouse of
the Roman west

... snip ...

At a point when most of the military had been pulled from Carthage for
some campaign ... the vandal/andals take advantage to take Carthage
and the west's food basket and economic engine. The west then had to
sign a treaty to keep up the flow of food ... but lost the taxes. They
had been using Carthage finances to pay tribute/bribes to tribes on
the northern boundaries as well as pay for mercenaries stationed on
the northern border, as well as eliminate taxes on the 1%. With the
fall of Carthage, they lost all that revenue and had to try and renew
taxes on the 1%. It wasn't enough to keep up the tribute/bribes and
pay for mercenaries.

In the Iraq war, they air shipped $60B in shrink-wrapped pallets of
$100 bills for tribute, bribes and mercenary pay ... but a lot of it
also disappeared into US pockets, however tribute/bribes/mercenaries
account for some reduction in hostilities during the "surge".

My son-in-law 1st tour was foot patrol 2004-2005 Fallujah and then 2nd
tour was "mounted" 2007-2008 in Baqubah which is described as much
worse than Fallujah. However, since the official line was that things
were much better, it didn't get much coverage.

Windows 10 forceful update?

hancock4 writes:
I think I mentioned that back in the 1980s Arthur Andersen & Co. (of
Enron fame) was hired by my employer at the time to rewrite a major
system. They introduced a 'productivity' framework, "Programmers
Workbench". Supposedly it sped up coding and made junior programmers
right out of school productive. But it introduced a lot of overhead
and they had to get a more powerful mainframe to handle the load. Also,
later on they discovered it wasn't Y2K compatible, and also had some
problems with newer releases of IMS. In the end, it all had to be scrapped
and a huge bunch of programs rewritten.

When AA collapsed after Enron, it was a shame that a lot of good people
lost their jobs. But it was hard to feel sorry for AA&Co as they were
extremely arrogant and difficult to deal with. Management was convinced
they were gods and whatever they said was gospel, even if they were flat
out wrong. Talented staff members with long experience were ignored
when they pointed out potential problems, and they turned out to be right.

AA had two parts, auditing and consulting.

Long ago and far away, we were brought into consultants to small
client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their
server, they had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted
to use, the result is now frequently referred to as "electronic
commerce". The bldg next door was a warehouse and the small
client/server startup had put in cubicles full of AA (consulting)
programmers.

Turn of the century, rhetoric in congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley would
prevent future ENRONs and guarantee that executives (and auditors) did
jailtime ... however it required SEC to do something. Joke at the time
was Sarbanes-Oxley with its increased audit requirements was really a
gift to the audit indusry ... nothing would actually change. Possibly
because even GAO didn't believe that SEC was doing anything, it starts
doing reports of public company fraudulent financial filings, even
showing the reporting fraud increased after Sarbanes-Oxley goes into
effect (and nobody doing jailtime)

However, when the chair of CFTC suggests regulating CDSes (heavily used by
ENRON), the chair is quickly replaced by Gramm's wife, until Gramm can
get legislation passed that prevents regulation of CDSes, then his wife
resigns and joins the ENRON board and audit committee (characterized
as gift to ENRON).

Later of course, the sellers of triple-A rated (that were paid for
even when rating agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A) CDOs go
from not caring about loan quality and borrower's qualifications to
doing triple-A rated CDOs designed to fail, pay for triple-A, sell to
their victims, and then take out CDS gambling bets that they would
fail
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Turns out that Sarbanes-Oxley also calls for SEC to do something about
rating agencies, but SEC did about as much about rating agencies as
they did about the public company fraudulent financial filings.

The largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG and is negotiating
to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the secretary of treasury
steps in and says that they have to sign a document that they can't
sue those making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds to
pay off the CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient of
TARP funds is AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs is
the firm formally headed by the secretary of treasury.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

MVS Posix

Mainframe hardware had been bringing in 4% of the revenue ... but
whole mainframe division (with software and services) have been
bringing in 25% of revenue and 40% of the profit.

I remember GPD/AdStar vp of software funding a lot of MVS POSIX work
as well investing in non-IBM solutions for mainframe use (he would
periodically invite us in to discuss companies he was interested
in). Issue was he was in intense battle with the communication group
(and was into all sort of work arounds to corporate politics)

Late 80s, a senior disk engineer gets a talk scheduled at annual,
world-wide, internal communication group conference, supposedly on
3174 performance ... but opens the talk with statement that the
communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the
disk division. The issue was that the communication group had strangle
hold on datacenters with corporate strategic ownership of everything
crossing the datacenter walls, and were fiercely fighting off
distributed computing and client/server (trying to preserve their dumb
terminal paradigm and install base). The disk division was starting to
see data fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly
platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with
a number of solutions to reverse the process, but were constantly
being vetoed by the communication group.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Trump Is Right, Bush Lied: A Little-Known Part of the Bogus Case for War

When director of CIA won't agree to "Team B" Soviet analysis
justifying huge increase in military spending, he is replaced by
somebody that would
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

Rumsfeld white house chief of staff (74-75), after replacing CIA
director he becomes SECDEF (75-77), and replaced by one of his
staffers, Dick Cheney. He is again SECDEF 2001-2006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

When Rumsfeld was white house chief of staff 74-75, Cheney was on his
staff. Cheney then becomes white house chief of staff when Rumsfeld
becomes SECDEF. Cheney is then SECDEF from 89-93 and VP 2001-2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

He is a leading neoconservative.[4] As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he
was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its
most hawkish advocate."[5] In fact, "the Bush Doctrine was largely
[his] handiwork."

"What I was trying to convey is that these were not militarily
significant because they not used as W.M.D.," he said. "It wasn't that
they weren't dangerous."

... and ...
The publicly released information also skirted the fact that most of
the chemical artillery shells were traceable to the West, some tied to
the United States.

These shells, which the American military calls M110s, had been
developed decades ago in the United States. Roughly two feet long and
weighing more than 90 pounds, each is an aerodynamic steel vessel with
a burster tube in its center

... snip ...

part of the issue is by destroying the government ... any responsible
control over these decommissioned weapons was lost (as well as more
recent consequences)

They also start deploying CMSAPL based sales and marketing support
tools. One of the issues is that apl360 was typically limited to
16kbyte workspaces and no system service API's like file i/o. CMSAPL
open workspace to virtual memory size and added system service API
... including file i/o ... opening up CMSAPL to a lot of real world
applications. Eventually sales and marketing support came to dominate
all HONE activity ... and virtual operating system use dwindles
away. HONE migrates to vm370 ... but there are constant battles for
decades with failed attempts to migrate HONE to MVS, periodically
blaming me because I provide HONE with enhanced cp67 and vm370 systems
that no MVS can match.

science center had also done a lot of performance technology,
monitoring, simulation, analytical modeling, workload & configuration
profiling ... some of which turns into capacity planning. One of the
APL-based analytical models then is enhanced and becomes the
Performance Predictor on HONE. Customer support people could enter
customer's workload&configuration information and then ask "what-if"
questions about what happens if workload and/or configuration is
changed.

In the mid-70s the US HONE datacenters are consolidated in Silicon
Valley (trivia, when facebook moves into silicon valley, it is into a
new bldg, next door to the old HONE datacenter). By the late 70s, HONE
VM370 is enhanced to be single-system image loosely-coupled cluster of
large mainframe multiprocessors (largest in the world) with fall-over
and load-balancing. Another incarnation of the APL-based analytical
model is used to make the load balancing decisions for front-end login
routing.

In the simplification morph from cp67 to vm370, a lot of things were
dropped including my dynamic adaptive resource management. First part
of 70s, there was Future System project which was different than
360/370 and going to completely replace 370 ... and internal politics
was shutting done 370 activity. I continued to work on 360/370 stuff
during the FS period, even periodically ridiculing FS activity.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys

In the 23June1969 unbundling, they start to charge for (application)
software, but manage to make the case with the government that kernel
software should still be free. The lack of 370 products during FS is
credited with giving clone processor makers a market foothold. When FS
implodes, there is mad rush to get stuff in 370 product pipelines
including decision to release a bunch of stuff I had been doing all
during FS period. Some of my stuff goes into vm370 release 3. The
market foothold of clone processors results in decision to start
charging for kernel software ... my dynamic adaptive resource manager
then becomes separate kernel component as guinea pig for transition to
charging for all kernel software.

I had also done automated benchmarking and as part of product release
do 2000 benchmarks that take 3 months elapsed time. The first 1000
benchmarks are defined to cover all points on the domain of observed
customer workload and configurations with a another modified version
of the (apl-based) Performance Predictor ... predicting what the
results will be and then comparing its predicted results with each
benchmark actual result. For the last 1000 benchmarks the Performance
Predictor dynamically selects workload&configuration based on all
previous results ... looking for possible anomalous operating
conditions.
http://www.garilc.com/~lynn/submain.html#benchmark

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

How to Kill the F-35 Stealth Fighter; It all comes down to radar ... and a big enough missile

How to Kill the F-35 Stealth Fighter; It all comes down to radar
... and a big enough missile
http://warisboring.com/articles/how-to-kill-the-f-35-stealth-fighter/

Claims are that the latest chips can do signal processing for real
time tracking and targeting, even reducing the number of
transmitter/receiver pairs in F22 AN/APG-77
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-77by nearly a factor of 100 times w/o loss of capability ... also
reducing power requirements and making it much easier to operate in
missiles (above claims 20kW peak power for AN/APG-77). A year ago last
spring, DOD puts the chips on export control list, last fall China
demonstrates their own at Supercomputer conference (such chips are
also used in large scale supercomputers, which China has the largest).

The other side is DOD has flagged a major threat is that increasingly
the electronics it needs for advanced weapon systems are being built
in china.

... implication is that both sides have advanced radar
state-of-the-art to the point that F35 stealth is obsolete.

Reference to F35 RCS is less than F22 ... can be from the front just
because F35 is smaller airframe ... but has more problems from every
other direction.

Gen. Hostage reference says he would need eight F35 with advanced
networking to do the job of two F22. Also F35 advanced networking can
be a vulnerability. That is possibly reason for the most recent
scenario using a very large airframe loaded with huge number of
missiles to compensate for F35 limitations.

digital signal processing is basically well-understood,
straight-forward number of calculations ... doing it in real-time then
is calculations/second ... and for particular environments,
calculations/watt (along with time-power tradeoffs). Significant
technology advances have spilled over into areas other than
tracking/targeting ... like self-driving cars and autonomous drone
swarms.

Well there is the extraordinarily long lead times and delays for the
F35 and opponents have danced through our networks several times
extracting detailed designs for advanced weapon systems (including
F35). Numerous times and ways it has been stated that F35 isn't air
superiority (for enemy area penetration role), requires F22 to fly
cover, future will be purely long-range missiles and targeting
technologies (also the theme of massive airframe with huge numbers of
missiles to compensate for F35 deficiencies). In the enemy area
penetration role, it isn't one-to-one dog fight ... its up against
enemy defense infrastructure ... including advanced networked,
multi-band/frequency tracking & targeting systems.

History of Computing 1944 and the evolution to the System/360

charlesm@MCN.ORG (Charles Mills) writes:
My *recollection* is that the S/360 30 came with up to 48K, or 64K by RPQ. I
could be off, but 1MB sounds incredibly high to me.

ga24-3231-7, 360-30 functional characteristics pg14 (from bitsavers)

c30 8kbytes
d30 16kbytes
dc30 24kbytes
e30 32kbytes
f30 64kbytes

....

univ had 709/1401 and was sold 360/67 replacement (for tss/360)
... pending delivery of 360/67, transition replaced 1401 with 64kbytes
360/30 ... gave univ. chance to get acquated with 360 ... but 360/30
could be also be run in 1401 hardware emulation mode.

tss/360 never quite came to production fruition ... so 360/67 ran most
of the time as 360/65 with os/360.

edgould1948@COMCAST.NET (Ed Gould) writes:
Remember the *OLD* days there was a 16MB max on (even) an MP? Never
mind the cost of $10K per meg (if memory serves me on a 168).
Yes the newer machines have more memory but in reality you really
don't get all that more functionality, and yes there are bells and
whistles for the z genation.

Significant MVS bloat by 3033 was causing a number of problems ... real
storage requirements was banging hard at the 16mbyte limit. 16bit 370
PTE was 12bit (4kbyte) page number, 2defined bits and 2undefined/unused.
They took 2undefined/unused bits then used them to prefix the (real)
page number ... allowing 14bit page number or up to 64mbytes of real
pages ... allowing lots of application virtual pages to reside above the
16mbyte line.

os/360 significant pointer passing API paradigm was making 16mbyte
virtual address space limit a problem. Transition from SVS to MVS gave
each application its own 16mbyte virtual address space ... but pointer
passing API paradigm required 8mbyte image of the MVS kernel in each
application virtual address space. Then because subsystems services were
in their own virtual address space, pointer passing API required 1mbyte
CSA (in each virtual address space) for passing parameters. CSA size
requirements were proportional to subsystems and applications ... for
large 3033s was 5-6mbytes and threatening to become 8mbytes (leaving
none for applications). Subset of "access registers" was then
retrofitted to 3033 as dual-address mode (allowing subsystems to access
application virtual address space w/o needing CSA).

problem was that 4341 clusters had more processing power than 3033, more
aggregate memory and I/O throughput, much lower cost and significantly
less physical and environmental footprint. Folklore is that head of POK
felt so threatened that corporate was convinced to cut allocation of
critical 4341 manufacturing component in half.

4341 had significant improvement price/performance as well as physical
and environmental footprint resulted in corporations ordering hundreds
at a time for placing out in departmental areas ... sort of the leading
edge of distributed computing tsunami.

Before 4341s shipped, I got roped into benchmarking engineering 4341 for
national labs for big compute farm ... sort of the leading edge of the
coming supercomputer paradigm

internet+distributed computing+compute farms ... evolves into cloud with
hundreds of thousands of systems and millions of processors in each
cloud megadatacenter (system&software costs have dropped to such a level
that power&cooling are starting to dominate cloud costs).

However, when the chair of CFTC suggests regulating CDSes (heavily
used by ENRON), the chair is quickly replaced by Gramm's wife, until
Gramm can get legislation passed that prevents regulation of CDSes
(characterized as gift to ENRON), then his wife resigns and joins the
ENRON board and audit committee. posts mentioning ENRON
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#enron

Later of course, the sellers being able to buy triple-A rating for
mortgage backed CDOs (even when rating agencies knew they weren't
worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional testimony, largely enabling
over $27T done 2001-2008), go from not caring about loan quality and
borrower's qualifications to doing triple-A rated CDOs designed to
fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims, and then take out CDS
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for bad
loans) posts (triple-A) toxic CDOsEvil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Rhetoric in congress was that Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future
ENRONs and guarantee that executives (and auditors) would do jail
time, but it requires SEC to do something. Possibly because GAO
doesn't believe SEC is doing anything, it starts doing reports of
fraudulent public company financial filings, even showing increase
after SOX goes into effect (and nobody doing jail time).Turns out that
Sarbanes-Oxley also calls for SEC to do something about rating
agencies, but SEC did about as much about rating agencies as they did
about the public company fraudulent financial filings. sarbanes-oxley
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#sarbanes-oxleyfinancial report fraud
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#financial.reporting.fraud

The largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG and is negotiating
to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the secretary of treasury
steps in and says that they have to sign a document that they can't
sue those making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds to
pay off the CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient of
TARP funds is AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs is
the firm formally headed by the secretary of treasury.

Jan2009 I'm asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (senate hearings
from the 30s into '29 crash that resulted in criminal convictions and
Glass-Steagall, had been scanned fall of 2008) with lots of internal
xrefs and URLs between what happened this time and what happened then
(comments that the new congress might have appetite to do
something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it won't
be needed after all (comments that capital hill is totally buried
under enormous piles of wallstreet cash). posts mentioning
glass-steagallhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

They were told that they could afford the no-down, no-documentation
liar loans. The largest fines so far have been for the robo-signing
mills to produce documents for fraudulent foreclosures, those $50B
plus fines were suppose to go to operations setup to help the victims
of the fraudulent foreclosures. However, most of the operations setup
somehow manage to vanish most of the money ... little making it to the
victims.

Besides "moral hazard", the joke is that because the $300B aggregate
in fines is so small compared to the too big to fail criminal
activity, it is just being viewed as the cost of doing criminal
business.

Some of the same people originating loans were also speculating in
real estate (one of the similarities between the economic mess and the
29 crash). A no-down, no-documentation, liar loan with 1% variable
rate mortgage, would see 2000% ROI in some of the hot markets that
were seeing 20% inflation (with the speculation further driving the
hot inflation(. The slight difference between what they were doing in
manipulating commodities ... was they could pump&dump on the way up
... but then turn around at short sell ... when they change to driving
the price down (instead of up). Their move into commodities required
driving volatility.

Griftopia has chapter on CFTC had rule that required significant
commodity position to play because speculators resulted in wild,
irrational price swings. Then there were 19 secret letters that went
out allowing certain speculators to play ... results included the huge
spike in oil (and gas) prices summer of 2008. Later Sanders releases
the transaction details showing which speculators caused the huge
spike in oil. Sanders then gets lambasted in the press for violating
the privacy of the institutions doing the speculation responsible for
the huge irrational price swings (which were the major too big to
fail institutions involved in economic mess last decade).
Griftopia posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#griftopia

The other issue is TARP was originally justified for buying the too
big to fail toxic assets being carried "off-book", but only $700B was
allocated ... while just the four largest too big to fail were
carrying $5.2T in off-book, toxic assets the end of 2008. TARP is then
used for other purposes (which may have been what was intended all
along), and the federal reserve is bailing out the too big to fail
with tens of trillions in ZIRP funds and buying the toxic assets at
98cents on the dollar (when the toxic assets had been doing for
22cents on the dollar fall of 2008; they could have used all the TARP
funds for that @.22cents/dollar but then the institutions would have
been declared insolvent and had to be liquidated). A little while
later, Bernanke holds a press conference and says he original thought
that the too big to fail would use the ZIRP funds to lend to
mainstreet, but when they didn't, he had no way to force them (but
that didn't stop the ZIRP funds). They were using ZIRP funds to buy US
treasuries and making $300B/year (compared to all total fines since
the economic mess of $300B). Now supposedly Bernanke was selected in
part because he was a depresssion era scholar. However, the federal
reserve tried the same thing in the depression with the same exact
results, so he shouldn't expected them to do anything different this
time. federal reserve posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fed.chairmanZIRP posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

Glass-Steagall prevented risky investment houses (and off-book toxic
assets) from being merged with federally regulated depository
institutions. Once that happens, the federal government not only has
to keep the federally regulated depository institutions alive ... but
also their toxic, criminal businesses.

One of the analysis is that Greenspan backed letting the fiscal
responsibility act expire in 2002 (spending couldn't exceed tax
revenue). 2010 CBO analysis was that by then, tax cuts had reduced
revenue by $6T and increase in spending was $6T for $12T budget gap
(compared to fiscal responsible budget). Since then there has been
nothing to restore the tax cuts and only small dents in the spending
increases .... so that interest on the federal debt is now pushing
half trillion dollars/yr ... making it possible for a $300B/yr subsidy
to the too big to fail (i.e. too big to fail use the tens of
trillions in federal reserve ZIRP funds to buy treasuries). If the
fiscal responsibility act had been left in place, there would be no
federal debt to run the scam. fiscal responsibility act posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.act

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

"Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> writes:
wrt "extra overheads". The belief that extra overheads are associated
with the old system doesn't fly because it assumes the doctors and
other people that claim to treat the ill are trustworthy - false
billing is still false billing. The childish Medicare system doesn't
even tell patients what bills are being paid in their name. Talk about
an attractor for greedy people!

I was asked to look at medicaid "up billing" and "fraud" estimated to be
25-30%. Federal pays 50% for state run operation. CMS (feds) were
offerring to increase to 60% the fed. percentage funding for states that
would pass legislation that would significantly cut fraud. Lots of
states wouldn't pass the legislation because they were heavily lobbied
by medicaid industry. State legislators got money from the industry for
not passing the legislation ... they didn't get anything for passing the
legislation ... even though it would save billions for states and the
feds. the cut in overall billing would be more than the 20% increase
that FEDs would pay (from 50% to 60%, actually reducing the total that
FEDs paid) ... and the benefit to the state would be enormous 20% cut
(from 50% to 40%) of a much smaller billing. Big win for everybody
except for the legislators and the medicaid industry that are skimming
tens of billions (and which totally swamps cases of individuals scamming
the medicaid system).

When Did AMD Fall Behind?

"Rick C. Hodgin" <rick.c.hodgin@gmail.com> writes:
I had reason to install OS/2 Warp 4 this past week, and I was reminded
what a smooth operating system it was compared to Windows NT. I wish
IBM would've persisted in the OS business and continued developing OS/2.

there was joke in the 90s about IBM loosing $5 on every PS2 but it was
planning on making it up in volumes.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

sidd@situ.com (sidd) writes:
Sometime during the crisis in 2007-2008, in a moment of inattention I
watched Charlie Rose, as is his wont, earnestly fellating Jamie Dimon.
Before i could turn him off, I heard Jamie utter his famous line,
"There's a difference between buying a house, and buying a house on
fire." To which I mentally replied, "Who set the fire, Jamie ?"

As I mentioned before, the president of AMEX was in competition to be
the next CEO. The looser takes his protegee and leaves, going to
Baltimore and taking over what has been described as loan sharking
business. They take over some number of other firms, eventually
acquiring CITI in violation of Glass-Steagall. Greenspan gives them an
exemption while they lobby congress for repeal of Glass-Steagall
(enabling too big to fail)... lobbying some number of people in
washington to assist including secretary of treasury (former head of
goldman-sachs) ... once they have it underway, the secretary of treasury
resigns and becomes, what at the time is described as co-CEO of
citi. The protegee leaves and becomes CEO of JPMorgan/Chase,
another too big to failhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagalland
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-failpaying for triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs that they knew eren't worth
triple-A (largely enabling doing over $27T 2001-2008) .... included
toxic CDOs designed to fail
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

IBM has gone into the red and is in the process of being reorged into
the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breakup. The board then hires
away the former president of AMEX to reverse the breakup and resurrect
IBM. Uses some of same techniques at IBM that had been used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

The NSA's back door has given every US secret to our enemies

JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA's back door has given every US secret to our enemies
http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-nsa-back-door-gives-every-us-secret-to-enemies-2016-2
So, while the NSA was monitoring our perceived Middle Eastern enemies,
the Chinese and Russians, and god knows who else, were making off with
every important secret in the US, courtesy of the NSA's back door. The
NSA failed to notice that 50% of Jupiter Network users were American,
and the majority of those were within the US Government.

2002 we get a call ... there is unclassified BAA (by IC-ARDA since
renamed IARPA) that nobody has responded to and we are asked to write
a response before it closes that day. Basically the BAA says that none
of the tools they have do the job. We get in a response and then have
meetings demonstrating that we can do what is needed ... and then we
don't hear anymore. It isn't until the Success Of Failure article
that we figure we had got called in on the loosing side.

triva ... companies in the private-equity mill are under enormous
pressure to cut corners and generate revenue for their parent every
way possible ... not just with government contracts. This is account
of over half the corporate defaults are by firms that are currently or
previously in the private-equity mill
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html?_r=0

I use to sponsor John's briefings at IBM, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who
Changed the Art of War pg281/loc4905-6:
He stalked the office, staring at his underlings, then suddenly
walking up to them, sticking a bony finger into their chest, and
saying things such as, "If your boss demands loyalty, give him
integrity. But if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty."

Qbasic - lies about Medicare

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
The NSA, an agency of the U.S. government, actually created a Linux
distribution, Security-Enhanced Linux, which (ironically!) offers as
its main feature a security level attribute for data files which is of
the same kind that Multics originally had as one of its unique key
features.

Qbasic

"Sangmo" <ju410@gmail.com> writes:
The reason is that that is what the voters have decided the govt
should be doing.

modulo being able to buy congress. 2002 congress lets fiscal
responsibility act expire (spending couldn't exceed tax revenue). 2010
CBO has by then congress has cut tax revenue by $6T and spending
increased by $6T for $12T budget gap compared to fiscal responsibility
act (which would have had zero federal debt). It is the only apparent
time that congress has radicully cut taxes to not pay for wars instead
of increasing taxes to pay for wars. CBO also reported that 1+ Trillion
of the spending increase went to DOD for which they couldn't find
anything to show for (unrelated to the increase in DOD spending for the
wars).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.actmilitary-industrial(-congressional) complex
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#military.industrial.complex

in addition to the tax evasion that was legalized last decade, in 2009,
IRS announced there was still another $400B in unpaid taxes on money
illegally hidden off-shore and were going after the 52,000 wealthy
americans responsible. Then in 2011, the new congress announces it was
cutting the budget of the IRS department responsible for recoverying the
funds
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and
compared what the people wanted to what the government actually
did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the
bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at
all.

...

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a
representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small
fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Early spring 2011, new speaker of the house on local DC radio interview
commented that he was placing new "tea party" party darlings on the tax
and revenue committee because those committee members get the most
"contributions" from special interests.

I've referenced before televised round table at annual economist
conference proposing "flat tax" as remedy to the enormous corruption in
washington (major reason behind congress being considered the most
corrupt institution on earth). The "flat tax" discussion was that
besides eliminating the enormous corruption by special interests for tax
exemptions, it would also save around 6% in GDP ... 3% because of
non-optimal business decisions made to conform with tax code and 3% in
overhead lost in dealing with the enormously (and growing) complex tax
code.

Catching Up on the OPM Breach
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/06/catching-up-on-the-opm-breach/
The audit also found that multi-factor authentication (the use of a
token such as a smart card, along with an access code) was not
required to access OPM systems. "We believe that the volume and
sensitivity of OPM systems that are operating without an active
Authorization represents a material weakness in the internal control
structure of the agency's IT security program," the report concluded.

... snip ...

Disclaimer, end of last century i design a security chip for
multi-factor authentication token. I'm on panel discussion in
standing-room only ballroom at
http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/index.html and make semi-facetious

and reference to taking a $500 milspec part, cost reduce it by 2-3
orders of magnitude while increasing its integrity and security.

I also get into some dustup with some in gov. over the chips selected
for the CAC-card

Qbasic

Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btinternet.com> writes:
Any tax reform will have to eliminate these exceptions and ensure that
they do not return.

Try reissuing the entire income tax law each year, possibly as part of
the budget. Limit changes to taxes to special tax laws.

one problem for congress outright selling tax exemptions for special
interest ... is that it was one time payment. congress had to come up
with a couple strategies to keep money flowing every year 1) facade
("kabuki theater") of conflict between different factions trying to
revoke/keep tax exemptions and 2) limit exemption lifetime that have to
be renewed.

John Boyd's Art of War; Why our greatest military theorist only made
colonel.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/john-boyds-art-of-war/
Here too Boyd had a favorite line. He often said, "It is not true the
Pentagon has no strategy. It has a strategy, and once you understand
what that strategy is, everything the Pentagon does makes sense. The
strategy is, don't interrupt the money flow, add to it."

One of the scenarios that saw enormous upswing last decade is
outsourcing to for-profit companies (especially owned by
private-equity firms) ... it is illegal to contribute/lobby congress
by agencies ... but private companies have less restrictions (it is
illegal to use funds from gov. contracts to lobby congress ... but
they have all sorts of ways to cook their books, it is one reason
beltway bandits and other gov. contractors need to have at least one
source of revenue that doesn't come from the gov).

The subsidiary revenue may all come from the gov., but its
private-equity owner can have other sources of revenue ... and the
private-equity owner does the lobbying.

As referenced in the "spies like us" article, security checks had been
outsourced to for-profit subsidiaries of private-equity firms and were
just filling out the paper work and not actually doing the background
checks.

In 1980, I was con'ed into doing support for channel extender for STL
that was moving 300 people from the IMS group to offsite bldg with
remote access back into the STL datacenter. The vendor then tried to
get IBM to release my support, but there was group in POK working on
some serial stuff that block it because they were afraid that it would
make it more difficult getting their stuff released.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#channel.extender

In 1988 (almost 30yrs ago) I was asked to help standarize some serial
stuff that LLNL was working with which quickly becomes fibre-channel
standard (including stuff from 1980). In 1990, the POK serial stuff is
finally released as ESCON when it is already obsolete. Then some POK
engineers become involved and define a heavy-weight protocol for
fibre-channel that drastically cuts the native throughput which is
eventually released as FICON.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

and wanted them to evolve into inter-operable with fibre-channel
.... instead they evolved into non-inter-operable SSA. Old post about
HA/CMP cluster scaleup meeting in Ellison's conference room in Jan1992
(also mentioning SSA)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

within a few weeks of the Ellison meeting, cluster scaleup is
transferred, announced as IBM supercomputer
(for scientific and technical only)
and we are told we can't work with anything that
has more than four processors. We had been working with national labs
on scientific and technical ... but also with RDBMS vendors on
commercial. Some old email for the period
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

we then decide to leave.

Early in the RS/6000, one of the engineers took the ESCON technology,
tweaked it with number of enhancements (full-duplex, 220mbits/sec,
etc) and it ("SLA") was released about the same time ESCON
shipped. Problem was that it was incompatible with ESCON and
everything else in the world. We then convinced him to join the
fibre-channel standards group (rather than doing 800mbits/sec version
of "SLA").

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

Testimony in the Oct2008 congressional hearings into the pivotol role
that the rating agencies played in the economic mess last decade ... was
that they were selling triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs when they knew
they weren't worth triple-A.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

TV news commentator during the hearings said that it would be unlikely
that the rating agencies would ever be federally prosecuted because they
were able to blackmail the federal government with downgrading the
government credit rating.

Other testimony was that it is enormously more difficult to regulate
something when it is incented to do the wrong thing. Prevously rating
agencies were paid by the buyer ... so it was in the interest of the
rating agencies to do as good as a job as possible for the benefit of
the buyer. Then the rating agencies changed to the seller paying for the
ratings ... and they become susceptable to the seller willing to pay
more to get a higher rating.

The triple-A ratings largely enabled being able to do over $27T
2001-2008 .... and also enalbed opened up being able to sell to
operations restricted to only dealing in "safe" investments like large
pension funds (claims that it accounts for 30% loss in many funds and
trillions shortfall in being able to pay pension benefits).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

There is the joke if you use a gun to steal several hundred ... its a
felony and you can be put away for a long time. But if its wallstreet
stealing trillions of dollars and ruining tens of millions of lives
... you can buy congress and walk away free.

The issue is the for-profit prison industry has heavily lobbied for
large numbers of non-violent offenders getting long prison sentences
... they get paid per head and non-violent offenders having the lowest
prison overhead/expense costs. When that isn't enough they bribe judges
to send them lots of non-violent juvenile offenders (even lower
overhead/expense cost/head).

Qbasic

Ibmekon <Ibmekon> writes:
Just so.
The popular current context is the Derivatives market, unregulated but
estimated at $1.2 quadrillion.
Advocates say the size is immaterial, it is a "zero sum game".
Of course if an Irish bank, eg AIB lost a few tens of billions to a
German bank, eg Deutsche, the effect on the Irish taxpayer is not
zero.

In the "The Big Short", the guy who was first to realise the impending
CFD CDO housing meltdown around 2007 was asked how he could predict
this.
He said there are signs before a market collapse - one indicator is
when the financial products get ever more complex. It is a sign that
Wallstreet is hiding the sh1t in an opaque wrapper.

Carl Goldsworthy
--
Derivatives is a "zero sum game" - "The Big Lie".

securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages. Early 1999, I'm asked to look at improving the
integrity of mortgage supporting documents as countermeasure. A FED LEO
explains that many of the investment bankers walked away "clean" from
the S&L crisis and they were currently manipulating the INTERNET IPO
market mill and they were predicted to get into mortgages next.

The problem then is that they find they can pay the rating agencies for
triple-A rating (when both the sellers and the rating agencies know they
weren't worth triple-A from Oct2008 congressional testimony) on toxic
CDOs; triple-A rating trumps supporting documentation and they can start
doing no-documentation, liar loans.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

during the first part of the century up through the crash ... there are
periodic industry articles about how complex the math is to correctly
value these products ... which is largely obfuscation since valuation is
dependent on valid supporting documents ... which they didn't have.
During this period there were periodic comments about the enormous
amounts of money to be made playing the game ... but it was a little
like musical chairs ... you had to know when to get out just before the
music stops (they knew it would meltdown, it wasn't if, it was when).

from the law of unintended consequences ... the biggest fines on the
too big to fail (for all this) have been for the robo-signing mills
that were fabricating the documents for the no-documentation liar loans
... in order to file foreclosers. Note they were able to scam that also.
They setup the firms that were supposed to administer the fines for the
benefit of the foreclosure victims ... and little of the money actually
make it to the victims.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-fail

while the senator gets law passed prevented regulating derivatives
(billed as gift to ENRON who is heavily playing in derivatives), the
wife then resigns and joins the ENRON board and audit committee.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#enron

Originally triple-A rating on toxic CDOs eliminated any reason to care
about borrower's qualification or loan quality. Then they realize that
they can design toxic CDOs to fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their
customer victims, and take out CDS/derivative gambling bets that they
would fail (they now have reason to care about loan quality, they
want large numbers that are as bad as possible)

The largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG and is negotiating
to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the secretary of treasury steps
in and says that they have to sign a document that they can't sue those
making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds to pay off the
CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient of TARP funds is
AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs is the firm formally
headed by the secretary of treasury.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

Late 80s, calculations on CITIs ARM mortgage portfolio shows that minor
rate changes can result in bringing the bank down. At the time, CITI was
the largest player in the market, it then gets out of the mortgage market,
sells off its portfolio and requires private bailout (Saudi prince) to
stay in business. old long-winded post touching on it and other subjects
from Jan1999
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm

the person responsible for the CITI portfolio calculations publishes a
number of industry articles in 2006 time-frame showing the Black-Scholes
calculations aren't accounting for the various kinds of CDO risk (not
even taking into account that the triple-A ratings aren't
accurate/correct and the lack of documentation on which to base risk
calculations).

Earlier, president of AMEX "wins" competition to be the next CEO. The
looser takes their protegee and leave, going to Baltimore taking over
what is described as loan sharking business. They make some number of
other acquisitions and eventually take-over CITI in violation of
glass-steagall. some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

They get lots of help from the then secretary of treasury (and former
head of goldman sachs) with repeal of glass-steagall ... who resigns
afterwards and joins CITI, at the time described as co-CEO. The protegee
then leaves and becomes CEO of another of the four largest too big to
fail.

KKR then runs into trouble and hires away the president of AMEX to turn
it around. IBM has gone into the red and is being reorganized into the
13 "baby blues" in preparation to breaking up the company. The board
then hires away the former president of IBM to reverse the breakup
and resurrect the company ... using some of the same techniques
used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

Reports are Greenspan supported congress letting fiscal responsibility
act (spending can't exceed tax revenue) expire in 2002 because he was
concerned about effect it would have had eliminating all federal
debt. 2010 CBO report has tax revenue cut by $6T and spending increased
by $6T for $12T budget gap (compared to fiscal responsibility
act). Since then the tax revenue hasn't been restored and only modest
efforts on reducing the spending ... so federal debt has further
balooned and interest on federal debt is approaching half trillion.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.act

Note that just the four largest too big to fail were still holding
$5.2T in off-book toxic assets the end of 2008 ... so there was no
possibility that the $700B appropriated for buying toxic assets in TARP
would make more than small dent in the problem. Instead TARP is used for
other purposes ... and the Federal Reserve is buying toxic assets at
98cents on the dollar and providing tens of trillions in ZIRP funds.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-fail

Bernanke holds a press conference not long after the Federal Reserve
looses the long drawn out legal proceedings to force it to divulge what
it was doing for bailout (including ZIRP funds) ... and says that he
assumed that the too big to fail would use the ZIRP funds to lend to
mainstreet, but when they didn't, he had no way to force them
... instead they were buying treasuries (federal debt) and taking in
avg. of $300B/annum (compared to aggregate of $300B in fines for all
illegal activity since economic mess). Supposedly one of the choices of
Bernanke (to replace Greenspan) was he was a depression era scholar, but
the FED had tried something similar then with the same results, so
Bernanke should have had no expectations that they would do something
different this time. In any case, w/o the explosion in the federal debt,
the too big to fail wouldn't have safe place to park ZIRP funds for
the $300B/annum.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

latest in the deferred prosecution sagas (gov. & HSBC fighting to
prevent disclosure of all the charges & settlement) ... part of the
reason that too big to fail are now also referred to as too big to
prosecute and too big to jail ... and the fines (small compared to
the amounts involves) are viewed as the cost of doing criminal business

Most recent peak i/o benchmark published by IBM was for z196 that got
2M IOPS using 104 FICON (running over 104 fibre-channel). About the
same time as the z196 peak I/O benchmark, a fibre-channel was
announced for e5-2600 blade claiming over million IOPS ... two such
fibre-channel have higher throughput than 104 FICON (running over 104
fibre-channel).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

In the early/mid 80s, LANL (a different national lab) does
standardized version of 100mbyte/sec cray channel as HIPPI. Somewhat
in parallel with fibre-channel, the HIPPI group is working on
standardization of fiber serial version of HIPPI channel (all at time
when the already obsolete ESCON is announced).

Besides serial-HIPPI and fibre-channel, about same time (Stanford)
SLAC is standardizing (serial fiber) SCI (scalable coherent interface)
... defined for SCI is multiprocessor memory bus (used by DG,
HP/CONVEX, Sequent, SGI) ... but SCI also has a scsi disk i/o protocol
defined. All of these are running gbit full-duplex (concurrent
transfers in both direction, aggregate 2gbit) at time ESCON is
announced. ESCON is 200mbit half-duplex (full-duplex would be 400mbit
but half-duplex isn't even 200mbit because overhead of handshake
protocol latency, the RS/6000 SLA version was full-duplex 220mbit,
capable of 440mbit).

According to published reports at the time, Kasich opened doors for
Lehman Brother's private equity department and investment officials at
the Ohio Police & Fire Pension and the Ohio Public Employees
Retirement System in 2002. Kasich made the case that Lehman would be a
good broker for real estate and other investments.

... snip ...

The industry got such a bad reputation during the S&L crisis that they
changed the industry name to "private equity" (and junk bonds become
"high yield" bonds).

IBM has gone into the red and is in the process of being reorged into
the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breakup. The board then hires
away the former president of AMEX to reverse the breakup and resurrect
IBM. Uses some of same techniques at IBM that had been used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

Qbasic - lies about Medicare

hancock4 writes:
When independent companies began to develop their own peripherals for
S/360, didn't they also have to develop device drivers for their
devices? Or, were their devices exact clones of IBM devices, so
they looked the same to the machine and program?

Also, when independents, for example Syncsort, develop mainframe
utilities, don't they do fancy stuff at a low level in order to
optimize performance?

CP67 was installed at the univ. in jan 1968 ... it had 1052 and 2741
terminal support and did automatic terminal identification ... using the
terminal controller SAD (CCW) command to switch the line-scanner for a
port ... as part of automatic terminal identification for each port.

The univ. had a number of TTY/ascii terminals ... so one of my tasks was
to add TTY support to CP67 ... including extending the automatic
terminal identification (using SAD command to select between the three
different types of linescanners for each port).

I then wanted to have single dialup phone number with "hunt group"
allowing any kind of terminal come into any line. It turns out that IBM
had taken a shortcut ... while it was possible to switch the linescanner
for every port/line ... but the line speed for a a port/line was
hardwired. So some ports/lines would be hard wired for 110baud and other
lines for 134baud ... and could switch 2741 linescanner for 110baud line
... but couldn't change the line speed. As a result had to have one
dialup number with pool of lines for 134baud hunt group and a different
dialup number with pool of lines for 110baud hunt group.

Somewhat as a result, the univ. started a clone controller project built
a channel interface board for a Interdata/3 programmed to emulate the
IBM terminal controller ... but the Interdata/3 could dynamically
determine terminal speed for each line and adjust accordingly. Later it
evolved into an Interdata/4 for the channel interface and a cluster of
Interdata/3s for the port/line interfaces. Four of us get written up as
responsible for (some part of) clone controller business. Later
Perkin-Elmer buys interdata and sells the boxes under the PE logo. In
the late 90s, I ran into one of these boxes in a large datacenter
handling majority of the dial-up point-of-sale terminals for the eastern
part of the country.

I was still undergraduate at the univ (before I joined Boeing and then
IBM). Close as I can tell they hardwired the line speed to each port
on purpose ... because there was no easy way to dynamically change
line speed. The interdata was programmed to strobe the signal
rise/fall to determine terminal speed.

has account of the effects of the failure of the future system effort in
the 70s resulted in shift in the culture with top executives trying to
save face (make no waves and sycophancy under Opel and Akers, in place
of open debate of the Watsons), thereafter IBM lived in the shadow of
that defeat.

The rise of clone processors then first results in starting to charge
for kernel software and then later object-code-only (eliminating
community access to source, a long time major source of innovation and
growth) trying to protect the status quo (a combination of trying to
protect both executive and corporate status quo).

Some of my stuff went into standard product release, put the dynamic
adaptive resource manager was selected to be separately packaged as
kernel add-on and guinea pig to start charging for kernel softare.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

For a period kernel software was the "free base" with increasing
amount of charged-for kernel add-ons ... until they finished the
transition and all kernel software was charged-for.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Microcode

The architecture "red book" was one of the first IBM documents moved
to CMS script. The full document could be printed or with a command
line parameter just the "Principles of Operation" subset. The full
"red book" had lots of engineering notes and implementation trade-offs
... overall and sections for each instruction. Implementation
trade-offs included stuff about how implementation might be different
on different current models and possibly in the future ... as well as
alternatives and justifications.

Low & mid-range machines were vertical microcoded ... sort like the
Hercules 370 emulator implemented in native I86 instructions. High-end
machines were horizontal microcode, much faster ... butt also
significantly more difficult to program. FS was going to completely
replace 370 and during the FS period, 370 efforts were being shutdown
... which is credited with giving clone processors a market
foothold. After FS implodes there is made rush to get stuff back into
370 product pipeline. POK kicks off 3033 (remap of 168-3 logic to 20%
faster chips) and 3081 in parallel. Some more discussion here
(including describing how non-competitive they were)
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htmposts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

Somewhat in response to clone competition, they start making little
incompatible tweaks to 3033 hardware with new releases only being able
to run with those tweaks. Clone competition getting tired of
constantly having to deal with the tweaking ... develop a new
implementation strategy called "macro-code" ... looks a lot like 370
assembler but is possible to implement constant flow of new IBM
processor tweaks with significantly less effort than what is required
doing in horizontal microcode.

They then use the capability to implement the hypervisor function
(precursor to modern LPAR) .... and it takes a long time before 3090
is able to respond with PR/SM because it has to be done in native
horizontal microcode.

Part of Endicott response to the death of FS is first 138/148 ... as
added feature they migrate part of kernel supervisor pathlengths into
(vertical) microcode. These machines are avg. ten native instructions
(microcode) per 370 instruction. I get con'ed into doing studies of
what system software pathlengths are redone in native (microcode)
.... getting 10:1 speedup. I'm told that I have 6kbytes of microcode
instruction space available ... but finally am able to identify the
parts of kernel operating system pathlengths that account for nearly
80% of kernel execution time that will fit in 6kbytes of microcode
(and get a 10:1 speedup). This approach doesn't work for the 3033,
since it is already avg. one 370 instruction per machine cycle (in
horizontal microcode).

I was involved in 370 16-way multiprocessor effort and we con some of
the 3033 processor engineers into working on it in their spare
time. Everybody thot it was great until somebody tells the head of POK
that it might be decades before the POK favorite son operating system
had effective 16-way support and then some of us are told to never
visit POK again (they still let me sneak in and go bike riding with
the processor engineers). After the 3033 is out the doors ... the 3033
engineers move over to 3090 (trout1.5) in parallel with the continuing
3081 effort.

SIE on 3081 was never intended to be used for customers ... purely for
internal operating system development. As a result, the implementation
was pretty horrible. The 3081 only had a limited amount of extra
microcode space .... and so the SIE microcode had to be paged/swapped.

Note that part of the (3033 & 3081) Q&D efforts there was the 303x
channel director. It was the 158 integrated channel microcode w/o the
370 microcode. A 3031 is then a 158 engine with the 370 microcode and
no integrated channel microcode and a 2nd 158 engine with the
integrated channel microcode (and no 370 microcode). A 3032 is 168-3
configured to use channel director for external channels. A 3033 is
168-3 logic remapped to 20% faster chips (with a little extra
optimization) and 1-3 channel directors for external channels.

I'm then at IBM San Jose Research ... and they let me play disk
engineer across the street in bldgs 14 (disk engineering) and 15 (disk
product test). Bldg 15 usually gets the 3rd or 4th engineering
processor machine to start disk i/o testing (they get the 3rd 3033
engineering machine). I'm doing some disk I/O latency tests and as
might be expected the channel director (being 158 integrated channel
microcode) is much slower than the original 168 external channels

trivia: high-end 360/370s and 3830 disk controller had horizontal
microcode tended to try and have multiple concurrent things going
on. as such 370 efficiency tended to be measured in machine cycles per
instruction. this is compared to low & mid-range machines that had
vertical microcode ... which looks very much like standard
assembler/machine instructions (like the hercules 370 emulator
implemented on I86 processors). 165 avg. 2.1 machine cycles per 370
instruction. 168-1 got faster memory and optimization, 168-3 doubled
the processor cache size and more optimization and was down to 1.6
machine cycles per 370 instruction. 3033 started out as 168-3 logic
mapped to 20% faster chips ... but also got additional optimization
that got it down to close to one machine cycle per 370 instruction
(reaching approx 1.5 times throughput of 168-3)

The 138/148 and 4331/4341 did ECPS ... moving highly used operating
system pathlengths into microcode on approx 1:1 basis getting 10:1
speedup. However that approach didn't work for 3033 since the
microcode implementations were so different. However, for 3033 they
did a series of "microcode" tweaks anyway that were required by latest
versions of software as countermeasure to clone processors (even in
cases where the microcode tweak might be slower than the original 370
code). Reference to selecting code paths selected for ECPS, 6kbytes
accounted for 79.55% of kernel processing time.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

In late 70s, there was the internal Iliad/801 project ... converge the
large number of different internal CISC microprocessors (s/38
followon, as/400, low-end & mid-range 370s, controllers, etc) to
common Iliad/801 chips where all the "microcode" was native 801 risc
instructions. For various reasons the Iliad/801 efforts floundered and
company returned to doing traditional CISC (microcode) microprocessor
chips (and saw various 801/risc chip engineers going to other vendors
to do RISC projects).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

disclaimer: the 4341 followon was the 4381 and originally was going to
be one of these Iliad/801/RISC implementations. However I helped with
the analysis that showed VLSI state-of-the art had advanced to the
point where nearly all of 370 could be directly implemented in VLSI
chip needing very little microcode.

Somewhere inbetween IBM processors and clone makers there was
SLAC&CERN (sister high-energy physics labs) did 168E circa 1979
followed by 3081E. These were processors that implemented 370 problem
state instructions sufficient to run Fortran H. Large numbers of these
were placed at sensors along the accelerator line for initial data
reduction.

Early in REX(X) (before shipping to customers), I wanted to
demonstrate that it wasn't just a another pretty scripting
language. IBM had large application, IPCS that was used for debugging
software, and examining system dumps diagnosing problems/failures
.... which was implemented in large amount of assembly/machine
language. My REX(X) demonstration was to implement an IPCS
implementation in REXX taking half-time over three months that had ten
times the function and ran ten times faster (some trick since REXX is
interpreted and normal IPCS was bare metal). Turns out that I finished
early, so I started doing automated library that would look/diagnose
for majority of common failure modes.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx

I had expected that it would be released to customers ... but some
reason that it wasn't ... even tho it came to be used by majority
internal datacenters and customer support PSRs. I eventually got
approval to describe "DUMPRX" at various user group conferences
... and afterwards, customer implementations started appearing within
a few months.

One of the features was pseudo decompile ... could have assembler
dsect macro and would format area of storage according to the dsect
macro ... also resolve addresses symbolicly

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Asynchronous Interrupts

Check sorter had timing dependent interrupt processing ... couldn't
work with MVS because pathlength was too long. .... even in standard
channel end appendage

After I transferred SJR, they let me wander around San Jose area
including the disk engineering lab and STL development lab.

In the disk engineering lab they were running stand-alone testing with
development disks, pre-scheduled 7x24 with a variety of
mainframes. They had once tried MVS to get some concurrent testing but
found MVS had 15min MTBF requiring manual re-ipl in that
environment. I offered to rewrite the I/O supervisor so it was bullet
proof and never fail enabling them to do on-demand, concurrent testing
... greatly improving productivity.

Later I wrote a (internal only) report of what needed to be done and
the increase in productivity ... unfortunately I happened to include a
reference to the MVS 15min MTBF ... which brought the wrath of the MVS
group down on my head. They weren't able to get me fired, but they
promised to do everything else they could ... including petty stuff
like not signing off on any sort of corporate award for the disk
engineering work. getting to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

The other result is that disk engineers would have a tendency to blame
my software if things weren't working correctly ... which resulted in
my having to shoot a lot of their hardware development bugs.

One problem that turned up was that in the change from the 3830 disk
controller (with "fast" horizontal microcode) to 3880 disk controller,
they decided to move to a much slower "JIB-prime" vertical microcode
processor. IBM had requirement that new boxes shouldn't be more than
10-15% slower than old boxes. Turns out that at end of channel
program, 3880 was taking much longer to finish up before presenting
interrupt. To try and fake it, the decided to present ending interrupt
early, before 3880 had actually finished ... then if 3880 discovered a
problem, it now had to present a "UNIT CHECK" error ... but it had
already signaled end-of-operation .... so they tried presenting an
"unsolicited unit check interrupt" ... which violates channel
architecture. They claimed they didn't do anything wrong ... I had to
diagnose what they were doing and then explain it was a violation of
channel architecture .... after that they insisted that I had to sit
in on conference calls with POK channel engineers (even tho I wasn't
even in their division).

The other problem was they figured that early "finish" interrupt, that
the 3880 controller could actually get finished before the software
could redrive it with queued requests. When I did the I/O supervisor
rewrite to be bullet proof and never fail, I also drastically cut the
pathlength. The product test lab was also running the system and used
it to put up an inhouse online service on their engineering 3033, that
could run concurrently with device testing. They had 3830 with 16 3330
drives. One weekend they replaced the 3830 with 3880 and monday
morning called to complain that I had done something over the weekend
to the software because online throughput had gone into the
dumpster. I eventually found out that they replaced the 3830
controller (after claiming they had made no changes). It turns out
that my superfast pathlength would also try and restart any queued I/O
after an interrupt .... faster than the 3880 could finish its cleanup
work. As a result, under load, nearly every I/O operation was
requiring two SIOs and two interrupts.

controller would signal ce+de after end of disk data transfer .... but
before the 3880 controller finished all its channel program overhead
processing (3830 controller would wait until its completely finished
with final channel program operational overhead, not just end of data
transfer). The 3880 people were hoping that signalling CE+DE early, it
could overlap the 3880 controller overhead operations before the
mainframe software could try and redrive the device with the next
queued request. I would get CE+DE, do initial interrupt processing,
dequeue a queued request and issue SIOF, the 3880 controller hadn't
finished controller cleanup so it would respond CC=1, CSW stored with
SM+BUSY (controller busy), i would have to requeue the request and
wait for the CUE interrupt (indicating the 3880 had actually finished
its internal controller overhead), at which point I would have re
dequeue the queued request and try a 2nd SIOF (two interrupts, two
SIOFs).

Now earlier, there were certain kinds of errors that would be
identified during controller cleanup processing and the 3880 was now
stuck with reflecting a unit check interrupt after it had already
reflected an early CE+DE (before all of the controller operation
overhead had finished ... trying to fake out that it was almost as
fast as 3830 controller). If the mainframe was fast enough it could
try to redrive and the 3880 could reflect the unit check as part of
CC=1, CSW STORED. However, if there was no immediate next queued
operation and everything went idle, they tried reflecting a
unsolicited unit check ... which violated channel architecture. They
eventually changed to only reflecting the "dangling" unit check to the
next SIO (when it eventually happened) as CC=1, CSW STORED.

Note that in the late 70s, it was recognized that MVS
interrupt/redrive overhead had gotten so horrible ... that disks were
spending increasing percentage of the time idle (between the finish
interrupt and start of next SIO) and as a result, lower
throughput. SSCH part of 370xa was specifically part of trying to
address this increasing MVS problem. Since I had already been told
that the wrath of the MVS group had dropped on me, it didn't bother me
to ridicule them about how horrible their pathlength was ... and it
was requiring hardware architecture to compensate for the problem.

Note, I'm referring to having rewritten the operating system I/O
supervisor and doing disk device I/O redrive of a queued request
after ending CE+DE interrupt. The reasons for queued requests could
be an application doing overlapped multiple buffering or totally
different applications queuing requests for the same shared disk

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Asynchronous Interrupts

In the mid-80s, I got asked if I could help IMS hotstandby. IMS
hotstandby would shadow everything to standby so if there was outage
... the standby system could immediately take-over with no downtime
... or at least almost. The problem was SNA/VTAM had extremely high
session startup and didn't do anything until one system had failed
before it would try and do the session startup for the TP devices
... not only was SNA/VTAM session startup excessive ... but after IMS
hot-standby, SNA/VTAM trying to do restart all at once, the overhead
increased non-linearly ... in some IMS hotstandby fall-over cases, the
SNA/VTAM startup could take 90mins.

Another kind of asynchronous processing is application wait/post
... like applications doing there own
multitasking/multithreading. BDAM read/write with wait/post, CICS
doing its own asynchronous processing, etc.

Charlie had invented compare&swap (chosen because CAS are his
initials) instruction when he was doing fine-grain multiprocessing
locking for CP67 at the science center. We then tried to get it added
to 370 architecture and it was originally rebuffed.The POK favorite
son operating system people claimed it wasn't needed because test&set
was sufficient. The 370 architecture owners said that to get it added to
370, we had to come up with justification other than multiprocessing
locking, thus was born the descriptions (still in principles of
architecture appendix) how it can be used for multiprogramming by
applications like CICS and large DBMS implementations (significantly
more efficient than SVC operating system calls, used whether running
on single processor or multiprocessor configurations). Later in the
80s, you find most other platforms running large DBMS implementing
instructions with similar semantics.
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822mnemonic was changed from CAS to CS & CDS
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6.2?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822&CASE=

disclaimer: when I was undergraduate, the university hires me fulltime
to be support for mainframe system. The univ. library gets an ONR
grant to do online catalog, the univ uses part of the money to get a
2321 datacell. The project is also selected to be one of the betatest
sites for the original CICS product .... and I get tasked to (also)
support CICS. One of the CICS bugs I had to shoot was in its original
implementation at a customer site, there was some hardcoded support
for a specific combination of BDAM parameters ... and the library had
specified a different set of BDAM parameters.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Early 80s, first time I sponsored Boyd's briefings at IBM, he (just)
did Patterns of Conflict ... the next briefing he wanted to do both
Patterns of Conflict and Organic Design For Command and Control
(which he was developing) on the same day. He would talk about WW2
required to deploy massive numbers with little or no experience and
needed rigid top-down command&control to leverage few experienced
resources available (as well as heavily, logistic based campaign). He
would describe how US corporate culture was being contaminated as
these former military officers climbed the corporate ladder (with
their rigid top-down command&control training). At the time, we were
having raging discussion about how some high level executives with
accounting & MBA backgrounds were making engineering decisions with
disastrous results. Disclaimer: I was blamed for online computer
conferencing on the internal network (larger than arpanet/internet
from just about the beginning until sometime mid-80s) in the late 70s
and early 80s. Folklore was that when the corporate executive
committee were told about online computer conferencing (and the
internal network), 5of6 wanted to fire me.

Boyd also referred to the WW2 US military needed something like 4-5
times the number of officers for its rigid, top-down command&control
compared to the WW2 german military. However, more important was that
the rigid, top-down command&control fostered a culture that assumed
only those at those at the very top knew what they were doing (and
everybody else needed rigid supervision, semi-independent from the
levels of management). Boyd would frequently refer to pushing
decisions to the people that were closest and knew most about the
problem.

I also had a project started in the early 80s that I called HSDT
... that was doing T1 and faster speed links ... while 37x5 boxes were
limited to 56kbit links. In 1986 I was having some equipment built on
the other side of the pacific, the friday before I was leave for a
visit, CPD sent out announcement for new online "high-speed" discussion
group with the following definitions:
low-speed <9.6kbits
medium-speed 19.2kbits
high-speed 56kbits
very high-speed 1.5mbits

the following monday morning on the wall of conference room
low-speed <20mbits
medium-speed 100mbits
high-speed 200-300mbits
very high-speed >600mbits

CPD had generated a report for corporate executive committee that
customers wouldn't be needing T1 speeds until well into the 90s. Their
report was based on survey of customers using 37x5 "fat pipes" multiple
56kbit lines operated in parallel as single logical link. They found no
customers using more than five 56kbit links in a "fat pipe". What they
didn't know (or conveniently ignored) was that typical telco tariff for
T1 was about the same as 5 or 6 56kbit links. By the time customer
needed more than 5*56kbit, they would switch to full T1 and use a
non-IBM controller. HSDT did trivial customer survey that found 200 T1
links connected to IBM mainframes.

HSDT was also working with the director of NSF and was supposed to get
$20M to interconnect the NSF supercomputer centers. Then congress cuts
the budget, some other things happens and finally they release an RFP
(largely based on what HSDT already had running, including requirement
for T1 links). Internal IBM politics prevents us from bidding, the
director of NSF tries to help writing the company a letter (copying the
CEO) including references to what we already have running is at least
5yrs ahead of all RFP responses, but that just makes the internal
politics worse. As regional networks connect into the centers, it morphs
into the NSFNET backbone (precursor to the modern internet). As an aside
the "winning" RFP response puts in 440kbit/sec links (not full
T1/1.5mbit/sec).

communication group was generating lots of mis-information internally
... they were also generating mis-information that sna/vtam could be
used for tying together the NSF supercomputer centers. Somebody
collected their mis-information about SNA/VTAM and forwarded it to us
(heavily snipped and redacted to protect the guilty)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email870109

communication group issues don't just stop with 37x5 boxes limited to
56kbit/sec speed links. VTAM processing had significant issue with
only allowing a limited number of bits in transit/flight. They
eventually come out with 3737 to support a T1 link that spoofs VTAM as
local channel-to-channel box. A 3737 has several 68k microprocessors
and a whole boatload of buffer memory. The 3737 is constantly spoofing
the local VTAM that the data has arrived so it will keep feeding it
data. The local 3737 then is transmitting the data over the T1 link to
remote 3737 (while the local VTAM thinks it has already arrived). The
remote 3737 then is doing the spoof in reverse for the remote VTAM. A
US T1 @1.5mbits/sec is aggregate full-duplex 3mbits/sec, A EU T1
@2mbits/sec is aggregate full-duplex 4mbits/sec. The enormous 3737
spoofing overhead limits it to about 2mbits/sec aggregate ... even
with all the 68k processors.

Qbasic - lies about Medicare

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Then the steel industry was unable to provide the different kinds
of steel that manufacturers wanted. The small steel mills were
able to adjust but not the big ones. The big ones also couldn't
convince the union to change methods so they could only sell
"one size fits all" steel.

much of the industry was looting revenue; not reinvesting in the
business, and not fully funding pensions.

because they weren't reinvesting and keeping up with technology ... they
start to see downturn (from competition) ... but it was accelerated
because of pensions being paid out of current revenue. in downturn, it
is possible for revenue to drop below the unfunded pension
obligations. Having previously looted fully-funded pension obligations
as profits ... then in any downturn they could reduce the number of
current employees ... but they couldn't reduce past pension
obligations. They eventually declare bankruptcy based on the unfunded
pension obligation ... dumping the obligation off onto PBGC (no
"clawbacks" of previous payouts as profit instead of funding pensions).
http://www.pbgc.gov/

dumping the obligations on the federal government is similar to
employers paying below living wages and relying on government social
programs to make up the difference.

another gimmick that industries used was changing the corporate
structure so that profit was moved from heavy people intensive part of
the business to subsidiary that required relatively few
people. airline industry did this by structuring airline operations as
break-even and moving profit to ticket (mostly computerized)
subsidiary. The airline operations can be showing no profit while the
parent company shows significant overall profit because the way it is
booked with ticket sales. Showing no profit or even loss gives
advantage in union/employee negotiations (even when parent company
still shows significant profit because of the way books are
done). They can even declare bankruptcy for the airline operations and
dump the employee pension obligations on PBGC. A number of years ago,
the parent company of one of the auto big three showed 5% of its
profit from making cars, but 95% of its profit from financing the
selling of cars (it was even possible for the making of cars shows
loss while parent company is still showing significant profit).

the books are cooked so the profit from operation that involves large
number of people making something are moved into a different subidiary
... so the people-intensive operation shows break-even or loss.

Trump vs. Hillary

Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> writes:
Just heard some RWer the other day saying Hillary would bring back the
bad old days of Bill Clinton. (Damn idiot wasn't sharing either.)
Save us from 8 more years of prosperity and an almost balanced budget.
We sure can't let that happen.

fiscal responsibility act ... can't spend more than tax revenue, initially
passed 5nov1990, in effect fy1991-fy2002 (started before his presidency
and continued for a little while after his presidency)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAYGO

congress lets fiscal responsibility act expire in 2002, if left in place
all federal debt would have been gone by 2010. 2010 CBO report has that
between end of the act and 2010, tax revenue was cut by $6T and spending
increased by $6T for $12T budget gap (compared to fiscal responsibility
act). Since then there has been no restoration of the tax revenue and
only small dents in the spending ... so interest on the debt is now
pushing half-trillion.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.act

so TARP was used for other things and the Federal Reserve did real
bailout behind the scenes (FED lost a long drawn out legal battle
attempting to prevent making public what it was doing) ... buying toxic
assets at 98cents on the dollar and providing tens of trillions in ZIRP
funds, with too big to fail also making something like $300B/year off
buying treasuries with ZIRP funds. W/o the enormous federal debt,
couldn't run the treasury interest/ZIRP scam.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

Qbasic - lies about Medicare

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
The latest gimmick is that the subsidiary (where the profits are being
booked) is moved offshore ... so the profit shows up in an extremely
attractive tax haven.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

one of the poster child is heavy equipment maker that makes, sells,
and delivers in the US; it changes to selling at cost to a new
distributor subsidiary in Luxembourg, which sells to the buyers in the
US (the equipment never leaves the US, delivered directly from US
plant to US buyer). The difference is nearly all the profit is booked
with the distributor in Luxemberg (where trivial tax has been
negotiated)
http://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Cloud Computing

There were a number of services expanding CP67/CMS into 7x24 online
operations ... including a number of commercial service
bureaus. Expanding CP67/CMS into 7x24 required a number of cost saving
operations, being able to operate "dark room" w/o operators, stopping
the system meter when there were no active users. This is somewhat
analogous to current day cloud, system prices have dropped to such a
point that power&cooling has become major cloud operational cost,
provisioning for large number of "on-demand" (idle) processors
required cloud operations pressuring chip makers to design processors
to cut power to near zero when idle but come up to full operation
instantaneous.

Some of the CP67/CMS equivalent was back then processors were leased
and monthly charges were based on system meter ... that ran whenever
processor and/or any channel was running. CP67 done special
programming to cut the processing & channel when nothing was going
on ... but be able to accept incoming characters. System meter did
require that both processor and channels had to be all stopped for at
least 400ms before it would stop. Note that MVS, long after market had
moved to sales, had a timer event that woke up every 400ms
guaranteeing that system meter never stopped.

19yrs ago, John Boyd, January 23, 1927 - March 9, 1997, tribute in USNI
Procedings, for those w/o membership ... it is here at wayback machine
http://web.archive.org/web/20011224132049/http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/c199.txt
He used it to re-design the F-15, changing it from an 80,000-pound,
swing-wing, sluggish behemoth, to a 40,000-pound fixed-wing,
high-performance, maneuvering fighter. His crowning glory was his use of
the theory to evolve the lightweight fighters that eventually became the
YF-16 and YF-17 prototypes--and then to insist that the winner be chosen
in the competitive market of a free-play flyoff. The YF-16, which won,
is still the most maneuverable fighter ever designed. The production
successors, the not-so-lightweight F-16 (Air Force) and the F/A-18 (the
Navy-Marine Corps aircraft that evolved from the YF-17), together with
the F-15, dominate the skies today.

... snip ...

by the time John passes, the air force has pretty much disowned him, it
was the Marines that were at Arlington. Boyd had story how the F15
forces knew he was working on YF-16 design and tried to get the Air
Force to charge him with theft of several million in gov. property; aka
supercomputer time used for YF-16 design, however an audit of
gov. computers failed to turn up the evidence. Hugh Laurie (TV House)
wrote a novel about military-industrial-complex and how egregious MICC
can be (and references Boyd).

disclaimer: I sponsored Boyd's briefings at IBM

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War; pg9/loc205-11:
The grass was wet and the air was clean and sweet. The crowd gathered
at Section Sixty, grave site number 3,660. The Marine colonel took
from his pocket a Marine Corps insignia, the eagle globe and
anchor. He marched out of the crowd, kneeled, and placed the insignia
near the urn containing Boyd's ashes. Someone took a picture. In that
frozen moment the light of the flash sparkled on the eagle globe and
anchor, causing it to stand out sharply against the bronze urn and
green grass. The black insignia drew every eye. As one, and without a
command to do so, the young lieutenants snapped to attention. Placing
the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps on a grave is the highest honor a
Marine can bestow. It is rarely seen, even at the funeral of decorated
combat Marines, and it may have been the first time in history an Air
Force pilot received the honor.

http://www.ausairpower.net/Profile-F-15A-D.html
The idea of an air-air fighter was under consideration as early as
1965, but the subsequent FX study generated by USAF Systems Command
created the concept of a 60,000 lb swing wing machine much like the
F-111, already under criticism for its inability to do what it wasn't
built for.

At this stage a Major John Boyd was appointed to rework the FX study and
generate a workable solution. Boyd was an outstanding air combat
tactician and the originator of the concept of energy
manoeuvrability. The concept revolves about the necessity for an
aircraft to maintain a maximum amount of kinetic/potential energy in a
dogfight, to be able to retain as much agility as possible.

... snip ...

http://www.flightsimbooks.com/jfs/page1.php
The FX program (Fighter eXperimental) was the result. The first FX
proposals were very heavy (60,000 pounds) and employed the
then-fashionable swing-wing design. This being too much like the
ill-fated F-111 design, the momentum swung in the other direction, until
in 1967 the conceived aircraft was down to 30,000 pounds.

after redoing the original FX (swing-wing) design for what becomes F15
... he then starts on yf16/f16 (anticipating that the f15 forces would
come after him and try and have him thrown in Leavenworth for the rest
of his life, he leaves no trail of his supercomputer use involved in
yf16 design).

The F-16 was the first production fighter aircraft intentionally
designed to be slightly aerodynamically unstable, also known as "relaxed
static stability" (RSS), to improve maneuverability.[66] Most aircraft
are designed with positive static stability, which induces aircraft to
return to straight and level flight attitude if the pilot releases the
controls; this reduces maneuverability as the inherent stability has to
be overcome. Aircraft with negative stability are designed to deviate
from controlled flight and thus be more maneuverable. At supersonic
speeds the F-16 gains stability (eventually positive) due to aerodynamic
changes

...
Unlike the YF-17, which had hydromechanical controls serving as a backup
to the FBW, General Dynamics took the innovative step of eliminating
mechanical linkages between the control stick and rudder pedals, and the
flight control surfaces. The F-16 is entirely reliant on its electrical
systems to relay flight commands, instead of traditional
mechanically-linked controls, leading to the early moniker of "the
electric jet". The quadruplex design permits "graceful degradation" in
flight control response in that the loss of one channel renders the FLCS
a "triplex" system.[72] The FLCC began as an analog system on the A/B
variants, but has been supplanted by a digital computer system beginning
with the F-16C/D Block 40.[73][74] The F-16's controls suffered from a
sensitivity to static electricity or electrostatic discharge (ESD). Up
to 70-80% of the C/D models' electronics were vulnerable to ESD.[75]

"J. Clarke" <j.clarke.873638@gmail.com> writes:
Note that that particular "sluggish behemoth" is so fearsome that one
lighting off its radar will ground whole third-world air forces and when
it was removed from service every single aircraft in the inventory was
destroyed lest the one third-world air force that had a few of them get
spare parts and thus do untold damage to the supposedly vastly superior
lightweight fighters that can't force it to engage, can't run away from
it, and can't shoot at it until long after it has killed them.

Oh, and I've seen a classified demo of the sluggish behemoth making
maximum-performance maneuvers. I pity the fool . . .

As yet unconfirmed sources suggest that APG-77 has a 'typical' operating
range of 193 km (120 mi) and is specified to achieve an 86% probability
of intercept against a 1 m2 target at its maximum detection range using
a single radar paint

... snip ...

Note last spring, DOD put advanced processing chips on export control
list. Last fall, at supercomputer conference, china demonstrated that
they were starting to make their own chips (besides used in advanced
radar, enormous numbers are also used in large supercomputers).

There is estimate that latest generation of chips, the number of
transmit/receiver pairs in the F-22 AESA radar could be reduced by
nearly two orders of magnitude w/o loss of capability.

a little more topic drift (one of the most critical has to do
software) ,,, original plan was that f-35 would be ready for combat in
2010 ... now it might now be until 2022:
The report's candor about the airplane's problems is unique among the
DoD's other reports about the performance of the F-35. It only exists
because Congress created an independent operational testing office in
1983 to report only to the Secretary of Defense and Congress. Without
this office, significant F-35 problems might never be revealed until
failure in actual combat.

As damning as this report is, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program
Office quickly issued a statement disagreeing with the report's emphasis
-- but acknowledging that every word of it is "factually accurate."

"J. Clarke" <j.clarke.873638@gmail.com> writes:
The F-35 is a fine example of why a committee should not be allowed to
design airplanes, and more importantly why a committee containing
representatives of the Air Force should not be allowed to participate
in the design of naval aircraft.

Pilots call high-maintenance aircraft "hangar queens." Well, the F-22's
a hangar empress. After three expensive decades in development, the
plane meets fewer than one-third of its specified requirements.

...
Anyway, an enemy wouldn't have to down a single F-22 to defeat it. Just
strike the hi-tech maintenance sites, and it's game over. (In WWII, we
didn't shoot down every Japanese Zero; we just sank their carriers.) The
F-22 isn't going to operate off a dirt strip with a repair tent.

But this is all about lobbying, not about lobbing bombs. Cynically,
Lockheed Martin distributed the F-22 workload to nearly every state,
employing under-qualified sub-contractors to create local financial
stakes in the program. Great politics -- but the result has been a
quality collapse.

The designs included those for the advanced Patriot missile system,
known as PAC-3; an Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles,
known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD; and the
Navy's Aegis ballistic-missile defense system. Also identified in the
report are vital combat aircraft and ships, including the F/A-18 fighter
jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the Navy's new
Littoral Combat Ship, which is designed to patrol waters close to
shore. Also on the list is the most expensive weapons system ever built
-- the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is on track to cost about $1.4
trillion.

Pilots call high-maintenance aircraft "hangar queens." Well, the F-22's
a hangar empress. After three expensive decades in development, the
plane meets fewer than one-third of its specified requirements.

Big cloud megadatacenters have been claiming for over a decade that they
assemble their own systems for 1/3rd the price of brand name systems
... this is further accelerating the commoditizing of computing

Computers anyone?

Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> writes:
DoD put out a request for the "F-X" and may have suggested it needed swing
wings, but McD proved that they were not actually NEEDED to fill all the
requirements, at least after several rounds of requests and proposals.

McDonnell-Douglas proposed a non-swing wing aircraft, and went on to build a
prototype. I saw it fly in 1973 at Wallops Station, a guy flew over from
Pax River with it. VERRRRY impressive handling and climb rate.

As far as I know, this became the F-15 with no large changes. They
did make some modest changes to the control surface areas.

FX early to mid-60s, all designs swing-wing and 60,000lbs or more , Boyd
design early 1967, MD included in 1967 2nd phase selection using Boyd
design/spec, MD final selection dec1969, 1st flt july 1972, full-rate
production six months later

An official requirements document was finalized in October, and sent out
as a request for proposals (RFP) to 13 companies on 8 December
1965. Eight companies responded with proposals. Following a downselect,
four companies were asked to provide further developments. In total,
they developed some 500 design concepts. Typical designs featured
variable-sweep wings, weighed over 60,000 pounds (27,000 kg), included a
top speed of Mach 2.7 and a thrust-to-weight ratio of 0.75.[12] When the
proposals were studied in July 1966, the aircraft were roughly the size
and weight of the TFX, and like that aircraft, a design that could not
be considered an air superiority fighter.[13]

...
This led to John Boyd's Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) theory, which
stressed that extra power and maneuverability were key aspects of a
successful fighter design, and these were more important than outright
speed. Through tireless championing of the concepts, and good timing
with the "failure" of the initial F-X project, the "fighter mafia"
pressed for a lightweight day fighter that could be built and operated
in large numbers in order to ensure air superiority.[16] In early 1967,
they proposed that the ideal design had a thrust-to-weight ratio of near
1:1, a maximum speed further reduced to Mach 2.3, a weight of 40,000
pounds (18,000 kg) and a wing loading of 80 lb/ftÂ².[17]

McDonnell Aircraft formalized the concept for the F-15 in 1967 when the
company was selected to enter the second phase of the U.S Air Force's FX
competition. Competing against Fairchild Hiller and North American
Rockwell, McDonnell used lessons learned during the Vietnam War on the
changing nature of jet age air-to-air combat, given that the F-4 Phantom
II was earning its reputation as a formidable fighter. On Dec. 23, 1969,
after more than two years of intensive testing and evaluation, the Air
Force awarded McDonnell Douglas the F-15 Advanced Tactical Fighter
contract. The McDonnell Douglas team had placed first among the three
competitors in all phases of the competition and had the lowest contract
price.

On June 26, 1972, James S. McDonnell, founder of McDonnell Aircraft,
christened the F-15 "Eagle." Test pilot Irv Burrows took the first F-15
Eagle to the air on July 27, 1972, at Edwards Air Force Base in
California. Six months later, the Air Force approved the Eagle for
full-rate production.

...snip ...

for a whole lot more, declassified F15 origins and development
1964-1972

Pilots call high-maintenance aircraft "hangar queens." Well, the F-22's
a hangar empress. After three expensive decades in development, the
plane meets fewer than one-third of its specified requirements.
...
Anyway, an enemy wouldn't have to down a single F-22 to defeat it. Just
strike the hi-tech maintenance sites, and it's game over. (In WWII, we
didn't shoot down every Japanese Zero; we just sank their carriers.) The
F-22 isn't going to operate off a dirt strip with a repair tent.

another issue with F-35 ... even if it had no problems and worked as
advertized and didn't have big budget and schedule overruns ... it was
designed as a bomb truck with F-22 flying cover and providing air
superiority

Gen. Hostage, head of the US Air Force's Air Combat Command, gained some
fame earlier this year when he said that "If I do not keep that F-22
fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant [as] the F-35 is
not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22."

Computers anyone?

"J. Clarke" <j.clarke.873638@gmail.com> writes:
A bomb pickup-truck perhaps--short range and small payload, vs the bomb
18-wheeler that is the B-52.

the F-35 stealth optimized for penetrating enemy ground-to-air defenses
... large numbers of F-35 then drop payload to take out all the
ground-to-air defenses ... so they have nothing to worry about on their
backside when returning ... and F-22 flying cover for any air-to-air
threats.

the B-52 hasn't been overlooked ... there are proposals using large
flock of F-35s out in front trailed by fleet of B-52 stuffed entirely
full ... with the F-35s providing targeting for the arsenal carried by
the B-52s. I posted a snarky comment about the spin in the B-52 proposal
wording as "complement/supplement the F-35" ... as opposed to
"compensate for the F-35 shortcomings".

since the F-35 payload is so small, the trailing B-52s would provide the
air-to-air and air-to-ground arsenal needed for the mission.

... but can also play gimmicks where human intensive operations are
manipulated so that they have little or no profit ... which plays
factor in benefit negotiations ... but can also setup for declaring
bankruptcy and dump the pension obligations on the government
http://www.pbgc.gov/

"private equity" (industry got such bad reputation during S&L crisis
that they changed the industry name to "private equity" and junk bonds
became "high-yield" bonds).

They borrow the money to buy company, put the money on the victim
company books, loot the company and then sell it off (make enormous
profits even if they sell the company for less than they paid). Analogy
to house flipping ... except they don't have to pay off the original
loan (it now belongs to the victim company). Over half corporate
defaults are companies currently or formaly owned by private equity
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html?_r=0

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of modern email, dies

hancock4 writes:
Based on inflation, if Western Union were around today, a telegram
would cost about $25 for only fifteen words, and the message would be
relayed over the phone, hard copy delivery cost extra. In 1975,
you were basically paying for an official legal record of the
message and faster transmission than via postal mail. Sadly,
you were also paying for a lot of labor and obsolete technology.

Western Union attempted to provide an email service, called EasyLink,
but it didn't work out, and helped bankrupt the company.

In early 90s, AMEX spun off a lot of its dataprocessing and other
businesses (including Moneygram) as First Data, in the largest IPO up
until that time. Later in the 90s, First Data merges with First
Financial (which owns the troubled Western Union and FDC has to spin
off Moneygram in the merger). However, by the middle of last decade,
illegal workers sending money home have increased Western Union
business until it was half of FDC's bottom line .... and Western Union
is spun off in IPO. President of Mexico had earlier invited FDC
executives for a Mexican visit and promised to throw them in jail (for
what WU was charging).

KKR runs into trouble with RJR, and hires away the president of AMEX
to turn it around.

IBM has gone into the red and is in the process of being reorged into
the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breakup. The board then hires
away the former president of AMEX to reverse the breakup and resurrect
IBM. Uses some of same techniques at IBM that had been used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

As mentioned above, companies in the private-equity mill are under
intense pressure to generate income any way possible, including those
that security clearances have been outsourced to ... which were found
to be just filling out the paperwork and not doing the background
checks (although as periodically mentioned, victim companies in the
private-equity mill account for over half of corporate defaults).

Note it is illegal for (including beltway bandit) companies to use
money from gov. contracts to lobby congress. However, a private-equity
firm could lobby on behalf of their subsidiary which might not have
any income other than gov. contracts (theoritically using money from
other private-equity operations).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

and then to 1200 baud 3101 (ibm glass teletype, for a couple yrs)
... which included some stuff skipping long blank runs with cursor
positioning ... internally also included being able to switch between
glass teletype and 3270 simulation.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/home3101.jpg

Then got IBM/PC with 2400 baud modem and ran internal "pcterm"
3270 simulator. The PC & host side did bit compression on the
transmission and also kept character string caches ... it could
transmit string location in cache as opposed to the actual
(compressed) string.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/homepc.jpg

as miniterm picture shows, I had compact microfiche reader ... at work,
it was possible to direct computer output (like large source listings,
documentation, etc) to microfiche printer.

PC was at original announce on the employee purchase plan ... however by
the time they started deliverying PCs on the employee purchase plan, the
street price had dropped to less than the employee discount (I would
have payed less if I had avoided the employee purchase plan and got it
sooner).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

hancock4 writes:
Sorry to get political here, but part of the fallout of the tea- party
movement has been an attack on business regulations and protection
agencies. Governing Magazine has reported how agencies that once
enforced wage/hour laws have been gutted with a loss of staff to
process complaints, as well as revised regulations that allow for many
loopholes.

This goes into lots of detail about how "globalization" was fabricated
for offshoring industries to sell goods back into the US (as opposed to
various claims that it increases world market for things made in the US
and increasing US jobs). It also talks about fabricating the unfilled
jobs number to justify H1B visas which are really a scam to replace US
workers with lower paid foreign workers. Part of it is large special
interests tying up economists in various ways ... highlighted by Inside
Job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)

Large multinational corporations (like IBM) have made extensive use of
this. Also cites major lobbying on part of special interests including
Chamber of Commerce, Council on Competitiveness, and Business
Roundtable. loc1762-64:
The reformulation of trade theory achieved by Ralph Gomory and William
Baumol was published by MIT Press six years prior to Porter's report,
but there is no mention of this seminal work in Porter's report. Just as
Porter's report ignored the empirical evidence, it ignored the
reformulation of trade theory.

In the early 80s, we had been working with the Director of NSF and were
supposed to get $20M to interconnect the NSF supercomputer centers. Then
congress cuts the budget and some number of other things happen, and
finally NSF releases an RFP (largely based on what we already had
running). Internal politics prevent us from bidding; the NSF director
tries to help by writting the company a letter, copying the CEO ... but
that just makes the internal politics worse (as does comments that what
we already have running is at least 5yrs ahead of all RFP responses). As
regional networks connect into the centers it becomes the NSFNET
backbone, precursor to modern internet. old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

As an aside, after the Director of NSF steps down, he goes to Council
on Competitiveness (one of the K-street lobbying operations), and we
would periodically drop by and talk to him there.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

"J. Clarke" <j.clarke.873638@gmail.com> writes:
We test PC code against mainframe code--different programs by different
programmers on different architectures that are supposed to give the
same results. It's fascinating to watch the PC grind away for 20
minutes and the mainframe, with an only slightly faster processor and
several thousand users, spit the same calculation out in 20 seconds.

the z13 refs that I've seen published is that it has 30% more
throughput than EC12 (or about 100BIPS) with 40% more processors
... or about 710MIPS/proc.

Claim was that at least half the per processor throughput improvement
from z10->z196 was the introduction of cache miss compensation
features that have been in other architectures for decades,
out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution,
etc. Further refinements supposedly contributes to further throughput
improvement in EC12.

Current e5-2600v4 blade supposed to be 3-4 times e5-2600v1
... somewhere around 1500BIPS (possibly 15 times that of z13)

e5-2600 blade can go for a couple thousand compared to around $30M for
the mainframe.

e5-2600 can be configured with comparable configuration to z10, z196,
ec12, z13, etc ... with fibre-channel with much higher throughput than
mainframe FICON (running over fibre-channel) and industry fixed block
disks as used by mainframes where they have overhead of CKD emulation
on same industry fixed block disks

don't run windows, the cloud megadatacenters with servers mostly run
linux, hundreds of thousands of systems with millions of processors in
a cloud megadatacenters.

it has been long time since industry standard TPC & SPEC numbers manage
to leak out for mainframe. IBM still publishes TPC numbers for
non-mainframe but it has been ages since any numbers for mainframe
http://www.tpc.org/similarly for SPEC
https://www.spec.org/

largely motivated by cloud megadatacenters benchmarks are starting to
include energy efficiency per operation. system costs have been so
commoditized, that for the cloud megadatacenters power & cooling has
increasingly become major cost.

when there use to be mainframe TPC DBMS transaction benchmarks manage
to leak out, unix&linux systems got ten times throughput or more than
mainframe (and cost/transaction was off the chart).

most recent, there was peak i/o benchmark numbers leaked out for z196
... it got 2M IOPS using 104 FICON (running on 104
fibre-channel). about the same time there was a single fibre-channel
for e5-2600 blade claiming over million IOPS (two such fibre-channel
having higher throughput than 104 FICON running on 104 fibre-channel).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

z196 has 14 system support processors dedicated for off loading some
of the i/o processing (these are in addition to the "80" processors
for execution). Published numbers are that all 14 processors run 100%
busy doing 2.2M/sec SSCH (i/o) instructions ... however recommend
operational characteristics is to keep the system support processors
to 75% busy or 1.5M/sec SSCH.

So far I've only seen EC12 throughput expressed in approx. some
percent more than z196, and similarly z13 throughput expressed in
approx. some percent more than EC12 ... but no actual benchmarks
... and for z13, not even the previously quoted BIPS numbers.

really long ago and far away, did compare NFS 8kbyte packet transfer
in UNIX at aggregate/total 5k instructions and equivalent operation in
MVS with LU6.2 was 160kbyte instructions (at a time when MVS tcp/ip
pathlength through VTAM was longer than the SNA pathlength through
VTAM). At the time MVS pathlength for just interrupt processing was
10k instructions ... some part of which have since been offloaded to
the system support processors (i.e. UNIX could completely do two NFS
8kbyte packet transfers in the instructions that it took MVS to just
do processing for single interrupt; the MVS instructions didn't
actually go away, just been offloaded into extra dedicated
processors).

The one place that mainframe does have some advantage ... is calls
between applications and subsystems. unix/linux have always been
multiple different address spaces and operations had to be message
passing through kernel calls. MVS history has forever been pointer
passing API in the same address space (from os/360 days). This was an
enormously tramantic moving to MVS with everything in different
address space. Eventually they defined access registers and program
call/return instructions. There are hardware tables for program call
for the defined subsystems ... including their address space
information. Access registers allow for multiply defined active
virtual address spaces, primary and some number of alternates. The
program call instruction will swap the application address space into
a non-primary access register and load the called subsystem into the
primary access register. The subsystem than has instructions to
load/store from the non-primary (calling application) virtual address
space. Then program return instruction will move the calling
application virtual address space from non-primary virtual address
space access register back into the primary virtual address space
access register.

In non-mainframe hardware, a call to subsystem in different address
space will require kernel call with lots of processing in the kernel
(which is moved into hardware architecture in mainframe). For this to
dominate in benchmark ... it would have to be nearly all kernel
processing time (handling message passing calls back & forth between
address spaces) ... since all the other MVS processing is taking
significantly larger number of instructions on significantly slower
processor.

Instead of providing light support aircraft loaded with technology like
the OV-10 Bronco, we spent billions fighting men in mud huts carrying
rusty AK-47s with F-16s and F-15s costing tens of thousands an hour to
operate. We literally flew the wings off our fighter fleet in the
process.

of course there isn't trillions of dollars for the
military-industrial(-congressional) complex. Part of the current cry
is no matter how bad the F-35 is ... it is the only thing there is ...
and if they can wear-out the current air fleet, it will accelerate
the spending of trillions on the F-35.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#military.industrial.complex

One of the comments was picture/reference to RAF&Rhodesian Hunter crews
in 1954 practiced by shooting holes in trash can (which is compareable
to what they are using F15s&F16s now).

GAO air power analysis of Desert Storm (42 days, only last 100hrs
involved land warfare). One of the most effective were A10 with 30mm
... used a million 30mm @$13 ... or $13M (and enormously so in
effectiveness/$$) ... one of the reasons that MICC doesn't like the A10.

Computers anyone?

hancock4 writes:
The whole idea of 'automated' personal computers was flawed. Remember,
we had computer viruses even in DOS days.

Hardware and software designers should've learned from that, but
they made things much worse.

Just like the Internet was designed 'too open', so were PCs. (Did they
have viruses on CPM machines? CICS or TSO?) The computer industry was
so hell bent on making machines super easy to use that they allowed
too many vulnerabilities. They really should've known better.

Amazingly, now cell phones are at risk.

When I got Windows XP, which wasn't cheap, they said it was a secure
system. But now they said its security is terrible. Go figure.

Today, when we add a new application to our PC, we don't have to do
anything, it is totally automated. Perhaps it wouldn't kill us to have
to follow some instructions and issue some DOS commands to allow a new
application. Those commands could only be issued at the PC from the
keyboard. Is this a bad idea?

PCs were stand-alone ("air-gapped") and small (safe) private business
LANs. Lots of business applications with automated execution evolved in
the small/safe private business LANs.

1996 MSDC at Moscone had banners saying "Internet" all over the place,
but the slogon in all the sessions was "protect your investment" ....
this was all the automated (basic) applications developed for the
small/safe business environment carried over to the internet ...
basically the same network support for local small/safe business network
... was expanded to support tcp/ip (and the anarchy of the internet)
... w/o any additional safeguards or countermeasures.

up until mid-90s, the major internet threat/vulnerabilities was buffer
length exploits in c-language implemented softare. Going into the
late 90s, the MS "automated execution" exploits grew until they
were as common as the buffer length exploits.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#buffer

old 2004 post with some analyses did on CVE database, at the time I
talked to the Mitre people about requiring classification keywords
in the CVE reports, but they said that they were lucky to get the
details they do get, if they started asking for better detail, some
people might not bother with generating CVE at all
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#43 security taxonomy and CVE

We consulted on dataprocessing modernization (replacing what was used
for 1980 & 1990 census) for the 2000 census (essentially for
out-of-pocket expenses). When census had all day audit on the effort,
I was asked to stand in front of the room and answer all the
questions. We then made an offer to do something similar for the VA,
meeting with the head VA staffer on the hill ... VA was just coming
off a multiple billion dollar dataprocessing modernization failure and
gearing up for the next one. Turns out that such offers are major
threat to the beltway bandits and their Success Of Failure culture
(not limited to intelligence agencies)
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/

Few may remember but a major plank in the original campaign of the
current administration was to reverse the enormous privatization that
occurred with the previous administration. It seems to have slowed
down or stopped, but little evidence of being reversed. The "spies
like us" makes reference to security clearances having been outsourced
to subsidiaries of private-equity operations ... in the wake of the
Snowden affair they were found to be filling out the paperwork, but
not actually doing the background checks (operations in the
private-equity mill are under extreme pressure to produce
revenue). There were recent articles that there is an attempt to bring
some of that back in-house. The contractor involved in the OPM breach
was also a subsidiary of a private-equity operation ... but it is not
clear that they just changed contractors.

A big part of the problem was the MICC was actively lobbying that
majority of the money go to large for-profit industry. MICC wanted a
war so badly that corporate reps were telling former eastern block
countries that if they voted for IRAQ2 invasion in the UN, they would
get membership in NATO and (directed appropriation) USAID (for
purchase of modern US arms).
http://www.amazon.com/Prophets-War-Lockheed-Military-Industrial-ebook/dp/B0047T86BA

But Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex didn't bother with
increasing appropriations for taking care of the current and former
members of the military. VA Administrative bonuses was based on things
like service wait time. Unfortunately service wait times were
exploding because congress failed to provide the necessary
funding. While administrators starting fiddling the figures to get
their bonuses, the enormously more egregious failing was congress not
providing necessary funding in the first place. Now you see reports of
industry lobbying in congress to make all sorts of cuts in military
benefits because they want that money too.

This report on "corruption" primarily comes down to administrators
fiddling the numbers ... which can be considered obfuscation and
misdirection, since it fundamentally comes to insufficient funding
from congress to provide appropriate level of service.
http://time.com/2809158/veterans-affairs-scandal-eric-shinseki/

They lied about the numbers and got their bonuses. However, if they
told the truth about the numbers and didn't get their bonuses ... it
still would have made no difference in the service delays.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Qbasic

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
in addition to the tax evasion that was legalized last decade, in 2009,
IRS announced there was still another $400B in unpaid taxes on money
illegally hidden off-shore and were going after the 52,000 wealthy
americans responsible. Then in 2011, the new congress announces it was
cutting the budget of the IRS department responsible for recoverying the
funds
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

loc3334-36:
Remember the dominance of IBM on the eve of the personal computer (PC)
revolution. The company had by far the most powerful brand in
technology. Each year it deployed a large R&D budget. And it was
profitable. By these metrics, it was in a very strong position to
dominate the PC revolution.

loc3336-39:
Research shows that IBM executives were aware of the "disruptive
technology" aspect of the PC. They discussed the issues involved,
recognizing the potential for a bimodal outcome for mainframe
customers, their bread-and-butter clientele. Some would be lost
permanently to the PC while others would be interested in mainframe
upgrades to support new requirements.

loc3340-41:
But when it came to implementation, IBM appeared to fall into the
"active inertia" trap. Rather than pivot decisively to the new
approach, they allowed their much more familiar historical behavior to
overinfluence their future actions.

... snip ...

Late 80s, a senior disk engineer gets a talk scheduled at annual,
world-wide, internal communication group conference, supposedly on
3174 performance ... but opens the talk with statement that the
communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the
disk division. The issue was that the communication group had
stranglehold on datacenters with corporate strategic ownership of
everything crossing the datacenter walls, and were fiercely fighting
off distributed computing and client/server (trying to preserve their
dumb terminal paradigm and install base). The disk division was
starting to see data fleeing the datacenter to more distributed
computing friendly platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk
division had come up with a number of solutions to reverse the
process, but were constantly being vetoed by the communication group.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

One of the APL-based analytical models was enhanced and offerred on
the world-wide online sales&marketing support system HONE
as Performance Predictor, sales support could enter
workload&system profiles and ask change "what-if" questions.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

In the morph from CP67 to VM370 there was a lot of simplification and
many features were dropped. During the FS period I continued to work
on 360/370 stuff (even periodically ridiculing FS activity). VM370
customers were lobbying for re-introduction of my dynamic adaptive
resource management and the with the implosion of FS and the mad rush
to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines, contributed to
decision to (re-)release my "Resource Manager".

I had also developed some automated benchmarking tools that could vary
workload & configuration. As part of the release of the "Resource
Manager", 2000 automated benchmarks were run that took 3months elapsed
time. The first 1000 benchmarks were selected to methodically cover
possible workload and configuration profiles. The last 1000 benchmarks
workload&configuration profiles was selected by a modified version of
the Performance Predictor which was fed results of all previous
benchmarks. It would select workload/configuration, predict the
results and then compare the benchmark results with the predicted. It
would also search for optimal workload+configurations doing "hill
climbing" searching for maximums and also attempting to differentiate
from "local" maximums verses "real" maximums. This assumes that there
might be an arbitrary number of optimal maximum solutions somewhat
analogy to multi-modal (not just bimodal) distribution.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#benchmark

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The Koch-Fueled Plot to Destroy the VA
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/koch-fueled-plot-destroy-va
Bottom line: there were some problems in Phoenix, where employees had
gamed the system for recording wait times. However, there was no
evidence that this problem was widespread; there was no evidence that
it caused any deaths; and there was no evidence that care had been
compromised. In fact, a Rand study concluded that with the exception
of patient communication with doctors and nurses, the VA performed as
well as or better than private health care on nearly every measure:

...
VA outpatient care outperformed non-VA outpatient care on almost all
quality measures. VA hospitals performed the same as or better than
non-VA hospitals on most inpatient quality measures, but worse on
others. VA performed significantly better, on average, on almost all
16 outpatient measures when compared with commercial, Medicare, and
Medicaid HMOs. On average, VA hospitals performed the same or
significantly better than non-VA hospitals on 12 inpatient
effectiveness measures, all six measures of inpatient safety, and all
three inpatient mortality measures, but significantly worse than
non-VA hospitals on two effectiveness measures and three readmission
measures. On most measures, Veteran-reported experiences of care in
VA hospitals were worse than patient-reported experiences in non-VA
hospitals.

... snip ...

Last decade the DOD budget was increased a couple trillion to send
soldiers off to war ... but little for when they came back. In 2012 a
neighbor in the mental health care profession, mentioned that VA
finally got extra funding for mental health care which amounted to
hiring every available person in the profession they could find. Their
comment was it would take at least couple years to train the people to
meet the demand. However VA is fighting with large arms merchants that
want VA&benefits cut to provide them with more money. One of Colonel
John Boyd quotes:
"People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong. The
Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: Don't interrupt the money flow,
add to it."

One of the side-effects of the lack of sufficient mental health care
professionals is that they are prescribing highly addictive
"maintenance" drugs that they may be on for the rest of their life
(which seems to just be fine with the drug industry).

2002 congress let the fiscal responsibility act expire (spending
couldn't exceed tax revenue). 2010 CBO report has in the interirm
taxes were cut by $6T and spending increased by $6T for $12T budget
gap compared to fiscal responsibility act (which also had all previous
federal debt paid off by 2010). Since then the taxes haven't been
restored and only few dents in the spending to interest on the debt is
approaching half trillion.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.act

First major bill after fiscal responsibility act as allowed to expired
was medicare part-d. CBS 60mins did expose that 18 republicans
responsible for the bill added one line sentence just before final
vote and prevents CBO from distributing report on effect of the change
(which prevents competitive bidding). Within six months after bill
passes, all 18 have resigned and are on drug industry payroll. 60mins
show drugs under medicare part-D that are three times the price of
identical drugs from the VA (which allows competitive bidding).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#medicare.part-d

By 2005 the US Comptroller General is including in speeches that
nobody in congress is capable of middle school arithmetic (for how
badly they savage the budget) and part-D comes to be a long term $40T
item totally swamping all other budget items.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#comptroller.general

Billions in waste is bad ... but last decade they were doing tens of
trillions ... 10,000 times (four orders of magnitude) as much.

There are similar numbers for the economic mess. Freddy & Fannie did
something under $500B. However the too big to fail securitized
mortgages designed to fail, paid for triple-A rating (when the rating
agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A) ... enabling them to sell
over $27T .... including to funds restricted to dealing in "safe"
investments (like large pension funds which lost something like 30% of
their value). The non-GSE did between 50-100 times as much as the GSEs
(Freddy & Fannie) but obfuscation and misdirection tries to divert
attention to the role of the GSEs ... when nearly 100 times as much
were done by too big to fail ... not involving the GSEs at all. End
of 2008, just the four largest too big to fail were still holding
$5.2T in toxic assets (of their own making) "off-book".
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-failand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

In 2010, CBO also looked at the DOD budget increase 2002-2009
... which included a little over $1+T that they can't identify what it
was used for. Of the budget increase that they can identify, it
includes $60B in pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills that were
airlifted to Iraq ... and apparently evaporated once it got
there. Remember that the original justification the administration
used for the Iraq war included it would not cost more than $50B
... and it is now well over trillion and counting (enormous amounts
evaporating into the pockets of the military-industrial complex).

Part of the issue was with four largest TBTF carrying $5.2T end of
2008, the $700B in TARP funds for toxic asset purchase couldn't dent
the problem. They came up with other ways to use the money and it was
left to the Federal Reserve to do the real bailout. The FED fought
long hard legal battle to prevent disclosure of what is really going
on (with tens of trillions in ZIRP funds and buying toxic assets at
98cents on the dollar). Shortly after disclosure, Bernanke holds press
conference and says that he had expected that the TBTF would use the
tens of trillions to help mainstreet, but when they didn't he had no
way to force them. Supposedly Bernanke was selected in part because he
was a depression era scholar, however the FED had tried the same thing
then with the same results, so Bernanke shouldn't really expected
anything different this time.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fed.chairmanand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

AIG was negotiating to payoff the CDS gambling bets at 50cents on the
dollar when the SECTREAS steps in and forces them to sign a document
that they can't sue those making the bets and to take nearly $200B in
TARP funds to payoff the gambling bets at face value. AIG is the
largest recipients of TARP funds and the firm formally head by
SECTREAS is the largest recipient of facevalue payoffs.

Between 1999 and 2008, CH2M Hill had a Department of Energy contract
to manage and clean 177 large underground storage tanks containing
mixed radioactive and hazardous waste at the Department of Energy's
Hanford Nuclear Site in southeastern Washington (the Tank Farms
Contract)

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

You count as an old-timer if (was Re: Origin of the phrase "XYZZY")

Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> writes:
Higher level machines had wider data paths and somewhat faster memories.
We had a 360/50 with LCS (Large Core Storage). It gave you a LOT of memory
(for the time) but it was DOG slow, 8 us cycle time. We later got a 360/65
and knew not to make that mistake again, it had internal memory, and they
could be interleaved, giving a substantial speed advantage.

some of the LCS installations instead of treating it like extension to
memory, treated it as a kind of (3090) expanded store ... or simulated
electronic disk. They would simulate read/write transfer operations
moving data back&forth between LCS and "fast memory".

360/65 multiprocessor was basically two single processor 360/65 with
memory laid out as single entity ... but both processors had their own
dedicated channels. all channels and both processors would contend for
memory access. SMP I/O would be simulated by having two channel
controllers ... that would be configured at same address on channels
going to the two different processors.

360/67 multiprocessor had multi-ported memory

original 360/60 & 360/70 were going to have 1mic, interleaved memory.
before they ship, memory is improved to 750ns (8byte) interleaved memory
and the models are changed to 360/65, 360/67, and 360/75.

pg29:
Four independent storage buses can be attached to the 2365-12: one from
each CPU and Channel Controller in a full duplex system.

pg36, figure8, model 67-1 has single bus to storage units

pg37, System Data Flow
In a Model 67-2 system, each CPU and each Channel Controller is
connected, with separate bus, to each storage unit in the system. For
example, a system with two CPUs and two Channel Controllers has four
buses. Each bus can connect to as many as eight storage units. Conflicts
that occur among the several buses connected to each storage unit are
resolved at the storage unit.

Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> writes:
The problem with 360's (and early 370's without DAT) was that programs
were totally relocatable at load time, but as soon as you executed a
few instructions, physical addresses ("pointers") and subroutine
return addresses were stored in registers and memory locations, and
the program could no longer be relocated. Not a big problem in the
smallest machines, but in larger machines, and especially when on-line
programming like TSO came into favor, you could have many hundreds of
programs in some stage of work. Without the /67's relocation feature,
swapping programs in and out of memory was essentially impossible, as
it would have to be swapped back into the same address as it had been
in before.

For the 360/67, IBM provided a very hacked OS called CP/67. Mostly
they had to make every system service handle converting any addresses
included as parameters from program space-relative addresses to
physical addresses before the supervisor-state routines could work
correctly. Not a terribly hard job, but required a huge amount of
code to be changed. Also, no I/O could be left hanging when a program
was swapped out.

os/360 "relocatable" were RLD records which gave location of the address
constant within the program that had to be "swizzled" after loading but
before execution could begin.

Official system for 360/67 was tss/360 ... which created location
independent execution image. Address space tables could be setup to
point to the executable image on disk ... and at arbitrary, dynamically
chosen virtual address ... w/o having to preload the image and swizzle
all the RLD address constant.

science center did (virtual memory) cp/40 and cms on 360/40 that had
been modified with virtual memory hardware. cms ran "stand-alone"
on 360/40 in standard 360 mode. CMS was developed in parallel with
development of cp/40 ... and some of it reflected the experience
that many had on MIT's CTSS (some of the CTSS went to the 5th flr
and did multics and others went to the science center on the 4th flr)

when science center is able to replace their modified 360/40 with
360/67, cp/40 morphs into cp/67. Melinda has a lot more of that
history ("VM History" about half-way down)
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/

One of the issues with CMS, was the science center adopted a lot of
os/360 applications ... and needed to provide os/360 system services
simulation in CMS ... and also acquired a lot of os/360 RLD address
constant conventions. Every CMS had its own virtual address space and
ran in a 360 virtual machine doing I/O with SIOs and channel programs
(ran the same way on stand alone 360/40 as it did in cp/40 or cp/67
virtual machine). It did do a executable image that had all the ADCONS
pre-swizzled ... but it resulted in them having to be loaded a fixed
address.

Jan1968, three people came out and installed CP/67 at university where I
was undergraduate. Over the next several months, I rewrote large parts
of the CP/67 kernel code (including significantly reducing pathlengths)
... and presented some results at the '68 SHARE meeting ... part of that
presentation:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#22 Pre S/360 IBM Operating Systems?

After graduating and joining the science center ... I did a paged-mapped
filesystem for CMS ... which had significantly higher throughput than
the standard CMS filesystem ... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

I also redid the CP/67 shared segment infrastructure ... so that could
dynamically have multiple shared things at arbitrary locations in the
virtual address space. Standard CMS executables transferred from
standard filesystem to page mapped filesystem would have to be mapped at
the pre-established fixed virtual address. For code to reside in shared
segment (appear concurrently at different virtual address spaces) I
usually had to do some amount of rewrite. For typical code that
would be address independent (similar to tss/360), i usually had
to do a whole lot more work. Lots of past posts about pain to
get location independent and/or shared code for CMS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#adcon

Note that for CP/67 virtual machine SIO ... CCWTRANS would scan the
channel program in the virtual machine, fixing/pinning the virtual pages
involved in the I/O in real storage, and creating a copy of the channel
program with the real page addresses (as opposed to the virtual page
addresses), start the I/O with the copy channel program and when it
finishes, "unpin" the virtual pages.

When they did OS/360 MVT for virtual memory OS/VS2 SVS, they initially
borrowed CP/67's CCWTRANS and worked it into EXCP/SVC0 processing. MVT
moving to virtual memory had to accept application channel programs
built in virtual address space and passed in EXCP/SVC0 and do the same
processing that CP/67 did for virtual machine SIO operation. That was by
far the biggest amount of code that tehy needed in going from MVT to
OS/VS2 SVS (OS/VS2 SVS startup would build a single 16mbyte virtual
address space and fix MVT to believe it was running on 16mbyte real
machine, then there was a little bit of code to handle page fault, page
replacement and page i/o operation).

Note: since virtual memory was handled on individual 4k page basis,
tasks could be dropped from queue and its pages replaced by some other
activated task while I/O simulation was in progress (only the virtual
pages actually involved in I/O were fixed, and they would be unpinned
and become available as soon as i/o completed) ... dropping from queue
can be done whether or not there was simulated I/O in progress.

I continued to work on CP/67 and would periodically ridicule FS. Part of
this FS was doing some of the worst of tss/360 "single-level-store" and
I would claim that I learned what not to do for my page-mapped CMS
filesystem from IBM SE that would play with tss/360 at the univ (even
tho tss/360 did location independent executable images
correctly). During FS they were killing off 370 efforts, which is
credited with giving clone processors market foothold. When FS implodes,
there is made rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipelines
... which contributes to decision to release a lot of stuff I had been
doing. Old email about having migrated my stuff from cp67 to vm370
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970